Family Communication Patterns, Parental Modeling, and Confirmation in Romantic Relationships

Abstract

This study explored family communication patterns (FCPs) (i.e., conversation and conformity orientations) and interparental confirmation as predictors of young adults’ confirmation in their romantic relationships (i.e., acceptance and challenge). Participants included 181 young adults from intact families. Results revealed conditional and interaction effects of family conversation and conformity orientations on the degree to which young adults confirmed their romantic partner. More importantly, FCPs and interparental confirmation were predictive of self-to-partner confirmation after controlling for reciprocity of confirmation within the romantic relationship.

Keywords:

• Confirmation
• Conformity
• Conversation
• Romantic Relationships
• Social Learning

Notes

[1] The original sample included 46 participants from divorced families, bringing the initial total to 227 participants. Given the theoretical focus of this study (i.e., interparental modeling of confirmation) and an inadequate number of participants from divorced families to conduct appropriate statistical comparisons, these participants were excluded from the analysis.

[2] From previous research, we had two measures of confirmation to work with—one that assessed confirmation globally on a continuum of confirming-disconfirming behaviors, and a second that assessed specific dimensions of confirmation in parent-child and sibling relationships. Both measures, however, were developed with adolescent and young adult children reporting on their own confirmation (rather than someone else’s) in their parent and/or sibling relationships. In adapting one of the measures to assess young adults’ perceptions of their parents’ confirmation with each other, we wanted to (a) reduce respondent fatigue given the number of similar items that respondents were already completing, and (b) create a somewhat different measure of the same global construct that would reduce common method variance and the potential of over-inflating the intercorrelations among our measures. We chose to retain the acceptance/challenge distinction when measuring respondents’ confirmation in their own parent or romantic partner relationships, but we opted for the more concise and global measure of confirmation when assessing perceptions of mother-to-father and father-to-mother confirmation. Had we added the acceptance/challenge distinction to interparental confirmation, we would have doubled the number of measures used for this construct, increased multicollinearity in our regression analyses, and further complicated the interpretation of the results.

[3] All correlated correlations for both sons and daughters were statistically significant at p < 0.01.