This research considers how communication within college student social networks may encourage high-risk sexual relationships. Students (n = 274) described sexual scripts for hooking up and reported on peer communication, sexual behavior, and sexual attitudes. Students described varied hookup scripts, expressed ambivalent attitudes, and reported moderate participation in hookups overall. However, the most common hookup script, suggesting high-risk sexual activity (i.e., unplanned, inebriated sex), was featured in most accounts of students who themselves participated in hookups. Students overestimated how often others were hooking up, and these estimates were especially inflated by students who frequently talked about hooking up with friends. Among students with strong ties to peers, frequent peer communication about sex predicted participation in hookups and favorable attitudes about hooking up. Peer approval also predicted hookup behavior and attitudes.
This study investigated 898 parents' and adult children's reasons for estrangement in light of research on interpersonal attributions and the relational consequences of perspective taking. Three primary categories emerged: estrangement resulted from intrafamily, interfamily, or intrapersonal issues. Within each category, the frequency of parents' and children's reasons for estrangement differed significantly from each other. Parents reported that their primary reason for becoming estranged stemmed from their children's objectionable relationships or sense of entitlement, whereas adult children most frequently attributed their estrangement to their parents' toxic behavior or feeling unsupported and unaccepted. Parents also reported that they were unsure of the reason for their estrangement significantly more often than did children. Examining estrangement from the perspective of both parents and adult children offers potential avenues for family reconciliation and future communication research.
Grounded in communicated sense-making (CSM) theorizing, we investigated communicated perspective-taking (CPT; i.e., conversational partners' attendance to and confirmation of each other's views) in association with individual and relational well-being in married couples who had miscarried (n = 183; N = 366). Actor-partner interdependence modeling revealed husbands' perceptions of wives' CPT were positively related to husbands' positive affect about the miscarriage and both spouses' relational satisfaction, as well as negatively associated with wives' positive affect. Wives' perceptions of husbands' CPT related positively to their own relational satisfaction and negatively to husbands' negative affect. Analyses revealed identification as a parent to the miscarried child (i.e., "parenting role salience") positively moderated the relationship between CPT and relational satisfaction. Implications for advancing CSM theorizing in health contexts and practical applications are explored.
This research focuses on how high school adolescents' (n= 159) perceptions of parent-adolescent communication about sex, including communication frequency, parent-child closeness, parents' communication competence and effectiveness, as well as the larger family environment relates to sexual risk-taking and permissive sexual attitudes. Findings show that perceived parental communication competence and effectiveness were the strongest negative predictors of adolescents' permissive sexual attitudes and sexual risk-taking, whereas peer communication frequency was a significant positive predictor. In contrast with previous research, adolescents' perception of parent communication frequency and family communication climate (e.g., conversation orientation and conformity orientation) was unrelated to adolescents' sexual risk. One of the most challenging conversations both parents and children report during adolescence is the ''sex talk'' (Guerrero & Afifi, 1995). Extant research has shown that the earlier and more often parents discuss sex-related topics with their adolescents, the more likely their adolescents are to delay their sexual debut and less likely adolescents will be to engage in risky sexual behavior (e.g., Guilamo-Ramos et al., 2012; Miller, Benson, & Galbraith, 2001; Silk & Romero, 2014). Despite the evidence that parent-child communication helps adolescents make sense of sex, many parents shy away from these discussions citing discomfort, lack of knowledge, and general communication issues as deterrents (Jerman & Constantine, 2010). Moreover the majority of research focuses on parent-child communication from the parent perspective. Because recent parent-adolescent dyadic studies have found parents and adolescents have different perceptions (Jerman & Constantine, 2010; Thompson, Yannessa, McGough, Dunn, & Duffy, 2015), an adult-centric focus may be inadequate for identifying the full range of elements associated with effective parent-child sex talks. In order to help parents feel more comfortable engaging in parent-adolescent communication about sex, researchers ought to spend less time on what communication and/or relational factors parents believe are effective and focus more efforts on how adolescents perceive these communication and=or relational factors (Miller-Day, Pezalla, & Chesnut, 2013).
This study adopts a dialectical perspective to explore how students transitioning to college communicatively negotiate the web of old and new relationships in the age of Facebook. Interpretive thematic analysis of 30 interviews revealed three discursive struggles: preservation and (re)invention, uniqueness and conformity, and openness and closedness. With time and space no longer inhibiting a connection to all the people in our relational lives, college students must make sense of the possibility for new senses of self when connected to ''home'' in a way previous generations never experienced. The contradictions present in the participants' voices illuminate the ways in which wider cultural discourses that construct college as a time of separation and independence enable and constrain students' understandings of their own emerging adulthood.
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