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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Quality Interactions And Family Storytelling, Allison R. Thorson, Christine E. Rittenour, Jody Koenig Kellas, April R. Trees
Quality Interactions And Family Storytelling, Allison R. Thorson, Christine E. Rittenour, Jody Koenig Kellas, April R. Trees
Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications
This study examined how individuals’ satisfaction with their family, as well as the ways they negotiated the telling of a family story, combined to predict their perceived quality of the storytelling interaction. Drawing from family members’ (150 individuals, 50 families) joint telling of an often told family story, multilevel modeling analyses revealed significant variance within and between families’ perceived quality of their storytelling interaction. These variances were explained by family satisfaction and family-level ratings of engagement during storytelling. These findings drive our suggestions for future assessment of multiple members’ perspectives of joint family storytelling interactions.
Telling Tales: Enacting Family Relationships In Joint Storytelling About Difficult Family Experiences, April R. Trees, Jody Koenig Kellas
Telling Tales: Enacting Family Relationships In Joint Storytelling About Difficult Family Experiences, April R. Trees, Jody Koenig Kellas
Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications
Narratives help people make sense of difficult experiences. In addition, stories provide insight into people’s conceptualizations of the world, including their understanding of their family relationships. Given these two functions of storytelling, the ways in which family members tell stories about difficult experiences together should reveal or reflect relational qualities. This project focused on how the family relational context relates to jointly enacted sense-making behaviors as families tell stories of shared difficult experiences. Findings indicate that interactional sense-making behaviors, in particular coherence and perspective-taking, predict important family relational qualities. This suggests that family qualities affect and are reflected in the …