Talking Turkey: Effects of Family Discussions About the 2016 Election over the Thanksgiving Holiday

Arguing about social distancing and family relationships

“…These results suggest open communication within the family unit and tolerance of differing opinions may help families avoid harmful repercussions of difficult conversations and may, in fact, bring them closer together. These results are consistent with those of Johnson et al (2019) in their exploration of the influence of FCPT on outcomes related to political conversations during the 2016 election. These results also provide support for the authors’ premise that predicted outcome value may help explain why conversation orientation is consistently related with more positive interpersonal interaction variables.…”

“…Interestingly, none of the independent variables predicted stress, which was unexpected given Johnson et al’s (2019) findings concerning stress following the 2016 election. This finding may be an artifact of how the items about stress were worded in the questionnaire.…”

“…Similarity of political views was measured using two items on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 7 = Strongly Agree) taken from a scale from Johnson et al (2019). The first item read, “My family and I tend to have similar political views,” while the second read, “I don’t usually agree with the rest of my family concerning politics.” The second item was reversed coded so that higher numbers represented a higher level of political view similarity, α = 0.92, M = 4.02, SD = 0.51.…”

“…Puente (2020) likened arguing about social distancing to families arguing about politics. Johnson et al, (2019) used FCPT to examine the effects of arguing about the 2016 election on family outcomes, including relational closeness and stress. Families who reported higher conversation orientation claimed that the political talk about the election had a more positive impact on relational closeness within the family.…”

“…According to A. Johnson et al (2019) : Political view similarity functioned as a weak antagonistic moderator, changing the relationship between conformity orientation and effect of political talk on family closeness; as similarity in political views increased, the initially negative effect of conformity orientation on the effect of political talk on family closeness changed to a positive one. (p. 70)…”