Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Casing Interpersonal Communication: Case Studies In Personal And Social Relationships, Dawn Braithwaite, Julia Wood, Paige Toller

Dawn O. Braithwaite

Chapter 26: "I'm Sorry for Your Loss": Communicating with Those Who Are Bereaved, authored by Paige Toller, UNO faculty member.

Casing Interpersonal Communication encourages students to learn about interpersonal communication by exploring real life situations. The engaging cases invite students to use abstract and conceptual knowledge drawn from theory and research to analyze and address concrete circumstances that will help them to then apply this knowledge to their own lives.

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 …