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Article Excerpt
Over the last decade, communication scholars have shown an increased interest in the everyday interactions that create, maintain, and alter personal relationships (e.g., Baxter, 2004; Dainton & Stafford, 1993; Duck, Rutt, Hurst, & Strejc, 1991; Goldsmith & Baxter, 1996; Tracy, 2002). As Gubrium and Holstein (1993) argued, the social world is constructed through everyday talk, and "discourse of all kinds ... are not as much spoken or transcribed descriptions of reality, as they are tacitly constitutive of objects and events" (p. 66). In other words, everyday talk consists of recurring patterns of speech events that communicatively embody or enact personal relationships (Goldsmith & Baxter). A constitutive vision of everyday talk in personal relationships enables scholars to focus on communication as the primary means by which relational partners shape personal identities (Tracy, 2002) and build, enact, and transform relationships (Baxter, 2004; Penman, 2000). Consequently, communication scholars are working to address the constitutive nature of communication, and those who have studied everyday talk have done so largely at the level of dyadic romantic relationships (e.g., Baxter, 1992; Duck et al., 1991) and from the perspective of a single relational partner (Goldsmith & Baxter).
Despite the value of this research in providing a communication-based vocabulary for describing different types of relationships, social life is made up of, and complicated by, larger social networks. One such social network that typically has a profound influence on an individual's identity, communication behaviors, and relational patterns is the family. Specifically, the stepfamily has captured the attention of social scientists across various disciplines due, in part, to the relational challenges and difficulties associated with adjusting to postdivorce and remarried family life. Defined by Ganong and Coleman (1994) as families in which "at least one of the adults has a child or children from a previous relationship" (p. 8), stepfamilies provide an ideal context for examining the types of everyday talk that constitute postdivorce and remarried family relationships. As Cherlin and Furstenberg (1994) argued, stepfamily members must "create a shared conception of how their family is to manage its daily business" (p. 370), and thus, we contend that this shared conception emerges from the seemingly mundane, everyday conversations that occur among different stepfamily members. While stepfamilies provide a potentially fruitful context for examining everyday talk, however, little is known about how stepfamily members interact and maintain relationships in the stepfamily through talk.
Family scholars are continuing their efforts to untangle the messages and message strategies that facilitate healthy stepfamily functioning (e.g., Afifi, 2003; Afifi & Schrodt, 2003a, 2003b; Cissna, Cox, & Bochner, 1990; Coleman, Ganong, & Fine, 2000; Golish, 2003; Schrodt, 2006a), yet three limitations to extant research formed the impetus for the present study. First, despite the potential heuristic value of examining family relationships via dialogue, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Coleman, Fine, Ganong, Downs, & Pauk, 2001; Fine, Coleman, & Ganong, 1998; Fine, Ganong, & Coleman, 1999; Golish, 2003), researchers have primarily approached the stepfamily from the perspective of a single member of the stepfamily system. Second, most researchers have focused their work primarily within the boundaries of stepfamily households and there has been a recent call to expand the boundaries of stepfamily research to include the nonresidential parent (e.g., Braithwaite & Baxter, 2006; Esposito, 1995). In particular, researchers have paid too little attention to how communication with the nonresidential parent is both similar to, and different from, communication with stepfamily members living in the same household (Braithwaite, Schrodt, & Baxter, 2006). Finally, some of the difficulties associated with adjusting to postdivorce and stepfamily life may be tied to the topics of conversation that most frequently characterize certain types of stepfamily relationships, as well as to the larger pattern of interaction that occurs among different members of the stepfamily system. For example, Golish identified a number of communication strengths that differentiated strong stepfamilies from those still struggling with remarried family life, while Schrodt (2006a) differentiated among five different types of stepfamilies based on stepchildren's reports of stepfamily functioning and the stepparent--stepchild relationship. What remains unanswered from these lines of research, however, are the specific frequencies and content of talk that occur within the stepfamily system. Such information may not only provide a descriptive foundation for future theoretical work in stepfamily communication, but may also prove potentially useful for counselors and practitioners who may be seeking a more holistic understanding of communication patterns in stepfamily systems.
These limitations to extant research, therefore, provided the impetus for the present study. As Coleman, Ganong, and Fine (2004) noted, "most of what we know about communication in stepfamilies comes from studies that were not specifically designed to investigate communication patterns" (p. 227). Thus, our focus was to examine the types and frequencies of everyday talk in stepfamily systems and the extent to which stepfamily members engage in different kinds of talk.
Theoretical Perspective
We adopted a family systems perspective in the present study, as our goal was to move beyond a focus on individual acts to examine patterns of talk that occur among a web of stepfamily relationships (Galvin, Dickson, & Marrow, 2006; Minuchin, 1974; Von Bertalanffy, 1968). A system is a set of interrelated parts that form a whole, and as Galvin et al. (2006) noted, systems theory has played a crucial role in the development of family communication research, in part, because it centers our attention on the holistic nature of interaction patterns. Although some scholars would argue that general systems theory constitutes a worldview or paradigm (e.g., Baxter & Babble, 2004; Polkinghorne, 1983), at a minimum, family systems theory represents a "root metaphor for thinking about family interactions as well as concepts and language for talking about ongoing, changing family interaction" (Galvin et al., p. 311 ). As such, system theorists have identified seven key characteristics or tenets that characterize family systems (for a detailed review, see Galvin et al.). Although addressing all seven tenets lies well beyond the scope of our study, we relied more generally on three key principles.
First, system elements are interconnected and thus, interdependence implies that the family operates as a highly connected web of personal relationships where each family member depends on every other family member to sustain the family system. Accordingly, family scholars may further our understanding of stepfamily systems by accounting for the various ways in which communication with members outside of the immediate stepfamily household (e.g., with nonresidential parents and stepparents) influences relationships within the household. Second, system theorists stress wholeness, or the notion that what emerges out of a family system is greater than the sum of the characteristics of its individual family members. As Galvin et al. (2006) noted, distinctive communication patterns between and among different family members emerge as a result of wholeness. Finally, family systems theory focuses our attention on complex relationships. Each family is organized into numerous interpersonal subsystems (e.g., mother-son, husband-wife, brother-sister, etc.), as well as the interpersonal dynamics between or among them (Galvin et al., 2006). Consequently, this principle further emphasizes the need for family scholars to account for the potential alliances, coalitions, and other forms of triangulation and loyalty divides that so often characterize postdivorce families and stepfamilies (e.g., Afifi, 2003; Afifi & Schrodt, 2003b; Amato & Afifi, 2006; Baxter, Braithwaite, & Bryant, 2006; Buchanan, Maccoby, & Dornbusch, 1991, 1996).
In general, then, we relied on the principles of interdependence, wholeness, and complexity from family systems theory, in conjunction with previous research on everyday talk in personal relationships, to form the framework for our present investigation. Braithwaite and her colleagues (2006) noted, however, that few family communication scholars have adopted a family systems perspective when researching stepfamilies, due in part to the complexity of stepfamily structures, the difficulties in trying to collect data from multiple members of the same stepfamily, and the concern about upsetting what is often a "fragile peace" in stepfamilies. It comes as no surprise, then, that with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Afifi, 2003; Coleman et al., 2001; Golish, 2003), previous researchers have centered most of their work on either individual stepfamily members or a specific dyad within the stepfamily, including stepparent-stepchild, remarried couple, and residential parent-child dyads (for a detailed summary, see Braithwaite et al., 2006;...
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