University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Marital communication: A feminist qualitative analysis

DeFrancisco, Victoria Leto

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/19893

Description

Title
Marital communication: A feminist qualitative analysis
Author(s)
DeFrancisco, Victoria Leto
Issue Date
1989
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Kramarae, Charles
Department of Study
Communication
Discipline
Communication
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
  • Language, Linguistics
  • Psychology, Social
  • Women's Studies
  • Speech Communication
Language
eng
Abstract
  • When people refer to a so-called gender-gap in communication, the assumption seems to be that women and men often cannot understand each other. In this project, I suggest that the communication problem is not that they cannot communicate, but that they often have trouble doing so to both partners' satisfaction, and that the way this problem gets negotiated may indicate relational control and gender inequalities.
  • Seven heterosexual married couples ran a taperecorder in the central living areas of their homes for approximately one week. Afterwards, I asked each partner to privately identify what she or he liked and did not like in the selected episodes of talk we reviewed. When I attempted to combine these inside views of on-going interactions with the traditional conversation analysis methods, I discovered some central ways in which much of the previous gender research is inadequate for studying social interaction. Identifications and interpretations for components of conversation such as questions, topic success, talk time, interruptions and other indicators of conversational attentiveness and control are much more context dependent than previous studies have suggested. Thus the major contribution of this exploratory study is in its critique of conversation analysis methods and related gender communication research.
  • I concluded that the so-called gender-gap problem is not a problem of inherent gender differences but of differences in some communication preferences. And furthermore, in light of the need to compromise preferences, the men in this study seemed to get their preferences met more often than women, particularly when communication involved the women's preferences for emotional expression and the men's preferences to avoid such behavior.
Type of Resource
text
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/19893
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 1989 DeFrancisco, Victoria Leto

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