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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Grieving Together And Apart: Bereaved Parents’ Contradictions Of Marital Interaction, Paige W. Toller, Dawn O. Braithwaite
Grieving Together And Apart: Bereaved Parents’ Contradictions Of Marital Interaction, Paige W. Toller, Dawn O. Braithwaite
Dawn O. Braithwaite
The researchers adopted relational dialectics theory (Baxter & Montgomery, 1996) to examine the discourse of 37 bereaved parents. Research questions guiding the study were what dialectical contradictions do bereaved parents experience when communicating with their marital partner after their child’s death and how do bereaved parents and their marital partners communicatively negotiate the dialectical contradictions they experience? Our analysis revealed that bereaved parents experienced a dialectical contradiction between trying to grieve their child’s death together as a couple and apart as individuals. Likewise, parents experienced a contradiction between being both open and closed when talking with one another about their …
Centered But Not Caught In The Middle: Stepchildren's Perceptions Of Dialectical Contradictions In The Communication Of Co-Parents, Dawn Braithwaite, Paige Toller, Karen Daas, Wesley Durham, Adam Jones
Centered But Not Caught In The Middle: Stepchildren's Perceptions Of Dialectical Contradictions In The Communication Of Co-Parents, Dawn Braithwaite, Paige Toller, Karen Daas, Wesley Durham, Adam Jones
Dawn O. Braithwaite
The researchers adopted a dialectical perspective to study how stepchildren experience and communicatively manage the perception of feeling caught in the middle between their parents who are living in different households. The metaphor of being caught in the middle is powerful for stepchildren and this metaphor animated their discourse. A central contribution of the present study was to understand the alternative to being caught in the middle and what this alternative means to stepchildren. Reflected in the discourse of stepchildren is that to feel not caught in the middle is to feel centered in the family. Stepchildren's desire to be …