Dating, Mating, and Communicating Unit 3

Flashcards with vocabulary terms and definitions.

Power

The ability to exercise one's will.

Personal Power/Autonomy

Power exercised over oneself.

Social Power

Ability to exercise one's will over others.

Relationship Power

Involves objective measure of power and subjective measure of fairness.

Reward Power

Based on an ability to give gifts and favors.

Coercive Power

Based on dominant partner's ability to punish partner with psychological, emotional, or physical abuse.

Expert Power

Stems from the perception of dominant partner's superior judgement, knowledge, or ability.

Informational Power

Based on persuasive content of what dominant partner tells the other.

Referent Power

Based on a person's emotional identification with the partner.

Legitimate Power

Based on the more powerful individuals' ability to claim authority or the right to expect compliance.

Resource Hypothesis

Partner with more resources (mainly earnings and education) has more power in the relationship.

Power-granting

Resources are socially structured by gender and hence unevenly distributed in heterosexual relationships.

Couple power resources

Reflect each partner's relative resources and gender expectations, norms, and socialization.

Decision making

Who gets to make decisions.

Division of labor

Who provides income or household labor.

Allocation of money

Who controls spending?

Ability to influence

Who feels comfortable in raising complaints?

Egalitarian unions

Share all four power-granting resources.

Gender-modified egalitarian unions

Absolute equality is diminished by the symbolic importance of maintaining fairly traditional, comfortable, and familiar gender roles.

Neotraditional unions

Traditional division of labor and male leadership but more egalitarian.

Power asymmetry

Often characterizes dissatisfied couples.

Supportive partners

Avoid power politics.

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)

Physical or emotional abuse of partner. Significantly higher for cohabitating couples than marrieds. Against women is higher than against men in every racial and ethnic category.

Situational couple violence

Symmetrical violence between partners that often occurs in conjunction with a specific argument - involved fewer instances, is not likely to escalate.

Coercive controlling violence

Abuse that is decisively oriented to controlling the partner through fear and intimidation; more likely to escalate and lead to serious or homicide than situational couple violence.

Intimate terrorists

Attempt to compensate for feelings of powerlessness or inadequacy; attempt to maintain control over partners trying to become independent of the relationship.

Battered woman syndrome

A wife cannot see a way out of her situation.

Child maltreatment

Covers both abuse and neglect; reported more frequently among poor and nonwhite families than upper and middle class white families; insufficient income.

Child abuse

Overt acts of aggression.

Child neglect

Acts of omission, failing to provide adequate physical or emotional care.

Emotional neglect

Involves being overly harsh and critical or being uninterested in the child.

Sexual abuse

A child's being forced, tricked, or coerced, by an older person, into sexual behavior for the purposes of sexual gratification or financial gain.

Incest

Sexual relations with a close relative.

Sibling violence

Violent acts perpetrated by one sibling against another; most pervasive form of family violence.

Stress

A state of tension that results from the need to respond to change, positive or negative.

Family stress

State of tension that arises when demands test or tax a family's capabilities and calls for adjustments; can be caused by potentially harmful, ambiguous or difficult situations.

Family crisis

Situation in which the usual behavior patterns are ineffective and new ones are called for immediately; results from an imbalance between pressure and supports.

Resilience

The ability to recover from challenging situations.

Stressors

Demands put upon a family cause stress and sometimes precipitate a family crisis.

Ambiguous loss

Uncertain whether the family member is "really" gone.

Vulnerable family

Families that are having difficulties or functioning less effectively before the onset of additional stressors or demands.

Resilient families

Families capable of doing well in the face of adversity.

Nadir

Lowest point of disorganization in a family crisis.

ABC-X model

A (the stressor event) interaction with B (family's ability to cope with a crisis) interacting with C (family's appraisal of the stressor event) produces X (the crisis).

The double ABC-X model

A becomes Aa (family pileup); pileup includes not just the stressor but also previously existing family strains and future hardships induced by the stressor event; pileup renders a family more vulnerable to emerging from a crisis at a lower level of effectiveness.

Vertical stressors

Bring past and present issues to bear on the family.

Horizontal stressors

Represent issues that are developmental and unfolding.

Reframing

Redefining stressful events with more positive family functions.

Refined divorce rate

Number of divorces per 1,000 married women; compares number of divorces to number of women at risk of divorces; more valid than crude divorce rate.

Crude divorce rate

The number of divorces per 1,000 people in the population; included portion of population (children and unmarried) not at risk for divorce.

Divorce divide

Large disparity in divorce rates between those with and without a college degree.

Starter marriage

First marriage that ends within the first few years, usually without children.

Silver divorce

Divorce in later years has increased, particularly for the Baby Boom generation (born between 1946-1964).

Redivorce

The end of a second or more marriage.

Independence effect

Women's earnings provide economic power, increased independence, and self-confidence for a woman to divorce; *only unhappy married women.

Levinger's model

Suggests spouses access their marriage in terms of barriers (what's stopping me?), rewards of current marriage, and alternative attainments (would I be happier? can this marriage be saved?).

Marital separation

Couple reports being separated.

Legal divorce

Dissolution of marriage by the state through a court order terminating the marriage.

Divorce mediation

The process in which a couple, with a mediator, resolves the settlement of their custody, support, property, and visitation issues.

Divorce fallout

Refers to ruptures of relationships and changes in social networks that come about as a result of divorce.

Economic fallout (of divorce)

Can be severe as a couple become 2 distinct economic units; no one "wins" financially in a divorce; everyone's standard of living suffers, especially children's; wives experience great and more enduring losses than husbands.

Child support

Involves money paid by the noncustodial to the custodial parent to support the children of a now-ended marital, cohabiting, or sexual relationship.

Income-to-needs

Measure of how well income meets financial needs; divorced women and children see this decline.

Stress-related growth

A crisis-related pathway results when coping with a traumatic event makes a person stronger; divorce provides an escape from marital behaviors that are more harmful than divorce itself.

Parentification

Being forced to take on adult responsibilities before children are developmentally mature enough to handle them.

Child custody

As formalized in divorce decrees, is most commonly an extension of traditional gender roles.

Legal custody

Who has the right to make decisions about their child's upbringing.

Physical custody

Where will a child live.

Joint custody

Both divorced parents take equal responsibility for important decisions about the child's general upbringing.

Binuclear family

The child is the "nucleus" in two households within one family.

Co-parenting

A "team" approach to raising children after divorce; parents work as colleagues.

Collaborative divorce

A model based on mutual respect; goal is to preserve the entire family's emotional and financial resource, and both parties agree not to litigate.

Re-partnering

The united states has the highest rate among industrialized countries.

Stepfamilies

Can be formed through legal marriage, cohabitation, marriage after childbirth or other arrangements.

Simplest stepfamily

Divorced or widowed spouse with one children remarries a never-married partner without children.

Preexisting coalitions

Because relationships between at least one parent and child will predate the stepfamily formation; may have significant relationship losses for all family members.

Stigmatized

Stepfamilies are perceived this way as being less functional and desirable than original two-parents families.

Cultural script

Set of social prescribed and understood guidelines for defining responsibilities and obligations for relating to each other.

Cultural ambiguity

Of stepfamily relationships has caused the remarriage family lead, some call it an incomplete institution lacking social norms to guide behaviors.

Boundary ambiguity

Uncertainty among family members about who is in and out of the family or who is performing what roles in the family system.

Triadic communication

Family dynamics can sometimes become set; relationship and communication patterns among a biological parent, stepparent, and child.

Linked triad

A child's interaction is connected with the stepparent through the child's biological parent.

Outsider triad

The child and biological parent maintain interactions but the step parent remains an outsider and pretty much irrelevant to the child's life.

Adult-coalition triad

The child views the biological and step parent as maintaining the couple relationship ignoring the child.

Complete triad

Communication flows freely, involving all stepfamily members equally.

Percolator effect

The "bottom up" operation of a stepfamily (from children to parents).

Role ambiguity

Lack of guidelines for stepfamily responsibilities, behaviors, and emotions-- leads to variable relationship and communication patterns.

Stepmother trap

Society seems to expect almost mythical loving relationships between stepmothers and children; biological mothers and stepmothers are often pitted against one another.

Common-pot system

Economic resources are pooled and distributed according to need regardless of biological relatedness.

Two-pot system

Economic resources are divided and are distributed along biological lines, and are only secondarily distributed according to need.

Stepfamily cycle

Illustrates a developmental approach; does not unfold in a near and precise way and it can take anywhere from 4-12 years to complete.

Intimate outsider role

Stepparent role when stepfamilies reach maturation; end result is a stepparent who can be a confidante, trusted adviser, and mentor for a child on subjects and areas too threatening to share with biological parents such as sex and drug use.

Aging families

Older wives concern themselves with marital equity when it comes to power, decision making, housework, and other/caregiving tasks; older couples may be engaged with parenting; older families may be lesbian or gay couples, more and more older families will be stepfamilies, communication is as important in older families as in younger families.

Active life expectancy

The period of life free of disability; as more Americans get older, more of us will be called on to provide care for a disabled parent or relative.

Multigenerational households

Homes in which three or more generations live together; ethnic groups other than nonHispanic whites are more likely to live here.

Widowhood

Usually a permanent status for older women; typically begins with bereavement, followed by gradual adjustment to the new, unmarried status and to the loss.

Tight-knit

Adult children are engaged with their parents based on geographic proximity, frequency of contact, emotional closeness, similarity of opinions and providing and receiving assistance.

Detached

Adult children are not engaged with their parents based on any of these six indicators of solidarity.

Latent Kin Matrix

A web of continually shifting linkages that provide the potential for activating and intensifying close kin relationships.

Elder abuse

The physical or psychological mistreatment or neglect of elderly individuals.