Interpersonal Communication: Chapters 10, 11

Rawlin’s 7 Stages of Friendship

• 1. Role-Limited Interaction:  this is when two people make the first contact.  Since neither person knows how this friendship is going to end up, they are wary about revealing personal information.  

• 2. Friendly Relations:  This is when small talk starts and you legitimately decide if you want to be friends or not.  You talk about interests, hobbies, experiences, etc and seek to determine whether our interest is reciprocated

  • Friendly relationships turn toward friendships with four behaviors:

    • moves away from what is required in the specific role relationship,

    • fewer stereotyped lines of interaction,

    • individual violations of public propriety, and

    • greater spontaneity

• 3. Moving Toward Friendship:  At this point, people started spending time together voluntarily and look to expand on the friendship.  You also increase breadth and depth by talking about attitudes and values. 

• 4. Nascent Friendship:  Interaction between the two people become regularized and standards or stereotypes you put on friendships is eliminated with this person.  People set up their own rules.  

• 5. Stabilized Friendship:  Here, both parties depend on the friendship and the two people count on each other automatically.  They trust each other, share intimate information, and expect that you will be friends for awhile. 

  • Active Friendships: ones where there is a negotiated sense of mutual accessibility and availability for both parties in the friendship

  • Dormant friendships: share either a valued history or a sufficient amount of sustained contact to anticipate or remain eligible for a resumption of the friendship at any time

  • Commemorative Friendships: reflect a specific space and time in our lives, but current interaction is minimal and primarily reflects a time when the two friends were highly involved in each other’s lives

• 6. Waning Friendship:  Unfortunately, all good things start to slow down.  At this stage, something comes between the friendship and it is harder to maintain than before.  

• 7. Post Friendship: Even if a friendship ended on a horrible note, there are still parts of that friendship that will remain with us forever, impacting how we interact with friends and perceive friendships. You may even have symbolic links to your friends: the nightclubs you went to, the courses you took together, the coffee shops you frequented, the movies you watched, etc

Matthews’ 3 Friendship Styles

• 1. Independent: often saw their friendships based on specific circumstances in their lives and not necessarily specific friends.

  • They also never reported having a close, special, or best friend relationship, so during periods of major life events, they didn’t have specific commitments to the people they called “friends.”

• 2. Discerning: marked by a deep connection with a friend or group of friends regardless of changing circumstances in their lives

  • when a discerning person loses a friend, they are the most likely to experience a deep sense of loss in their lives.

• 3. Aquisitive: people who moved through their lives collecting a variety of friendships, allowing circumstances to make possible the meeting of likely candidates, but then, committing themselves to the friendships once they were made, at the very least for the period of time during which they and their friends were geographically proximate

  • having close connections with all of the friends they’ve met, and unlike the discerning, acquisitives were open to developing new friendships throughout their lives

Healthy & Unhealthy Friendships

• Good and Bad Relationships: Another system for understanding friendships is to think of them with regard to two basic psychological constructs: health and enjoyment.

  • Types of Relationships:

    • 1. Ideal Friendship: Healthy and enjoyable

    • 2. Waning Friendship: Healthy and not enjoyable

    • 3. Problematic Friendship: Not healthy and enjoyable

    • 4. Deviant Friendship: Not healthy and not enjoyable

two factors were the most important when it came to developing cross-group friendships: racism and exposure to cross-group friendships.

• First, individuals who are racist are less likely to engage in crossgroup friendships.

• Second, actual exposure to cross-group friendships can lead to more intergroup contact and more positive attitudes towards members in those groups.

  • Ultimately, successful cross-group friendships succeed or fail based on two primary factors: time and self-disclosure.

Fitzpatrick’s Marriage Relational Dimensions

• 1. Conventional v. Unconventional Ideology

  • Ideology of Traditionalism: a couple has a very historically grounded and conservative perspective of marriage

    • families should strive to keep up appearances and not talk about any of the issues going on within the family itself

  • Ideology of Uncertainty and Change: the notion that people should be open to uncertainty

• 2. Interdependence v. Autonomy

  • Sharing: consists of two components

    • 1. discussing the affective or emotional health of each of the partners and the relationship while exhibiting nonverbal affective displays

    • 2. expands across the other dimensions

    • open sharing of love and caring, and the tendency to communicate a wide range and intensity of feelings. There is a sharing of both task and leisure activities, as well as a considerable degree of mutual empathy. Finally, these relational partners not only visit with friends but also seek new friends and experiences

  • Autonomy: an individual’s independence in their own behaviors and thoughts

  • Undifferentiated Space: there are few constraints on physical spaces within the home. Spouses do not see her/his/their ownership of personal belongings as much as they do ownership as a couple.

  • Temporal Regularity: examines strict a schedule couples stick to. Do they always get up at the same time?

• 3. Conflict engagement v. Avoidance

  • Conflict Avoidance

  • Assertiveness: persuasion and standing up for oneself

3 Marriage Types

• Traditionals: highly interdependent, have a conventional ideology, and high levels of conflict engagement

  • greatest levels of satisfaction.

• Independents: a high level of interdependence, an unconventional ideology, and high levels of conflict engagement.

  • To these individuals, marriage is something that compliments their way of life and not something that constrains it.

• Separates: low interdependence, have a conventional ideology, and low levels of conflict engagement.

  • these couples tend to focus more on maintaining their individual identity than relational maintenance.

  • lowest levels of marriage satisfaction

Same Sex Marriage

• the researchers found that among gay males, there are approximately the same proportion of traditionals, yet significantly fewer independents and more separates than in the random, heterosexual sample.

• For lesbians, there were significantly more traditionals, fewer independents, and fewer separates than in the random, heterosexual sample.

• In an analysis of the Journal of Family Communication, of the 300+ articles published in that journal since its inception in 2001, only nine articles have examined issues related to LGBTQIA+ families

Synchronous v. Asynchronous Communication

Synchronous Communication: real-time communication

Asynchronous Communication: communication when time permits

Nonverbal CMC

Because there is no nonverbal function of CMC, there is an aspect of impersonal communication. This lies on 3 assumptions:

1. Communication mediated by technology lacks nonverbal communication

2. Different media filter out or transmit different cues

3. Substituting technology-mediated for FtF communication will result in predictable changes in intrapersonal and interpersonal variables

Netiquette

• Netiquette: set of professional and social rules and norms that are considered polite when interacting with someone online 

  • Definition involves…

    • Context: Formal v. Informal

    • Rules and norms

    • Acceptable and Polite CMC behavior

    • Online interaction:

      • One-on-one v. one-to-many (i.e zoom meeting)

    • Range of mediating technologies