Family Ties: Communicating Identity Through Jointly Told Family Stories

Abstract

Family stories work to construct family identity. Little research, however, has examined storytelling in families. This study examined storytelling content and process to assess the extent to which families jointly integrated or fragmented a shared sense of identity and how these discursive practices relate to family qualities. Results of a study involving 58 family triads indicate relationships between story theme (e.g., accomplishment vs. stress), person referencing practices (e.g., we-ness vs. separateness), and interactional storytelling behaviors (e.g., engagement, turn-taking). Moreover, story framing, perspective-taking, statements about selves-in-the-family, and identifying as a “storytelling family” emerged consistently as positive predictors of family satisfaction and functioning. The results offer a portrait of how families communicate identity and functioning in joint storytelling interactions and further position storytelling as a communication phenomenon worthy of consideration.

Keywords:

• Family Storytelling
• Identity
• Narrative
• Family Functioning
• Family Communication

The author would like to thank Dr. Valerie Manusov, her dissertation advisor, and Dr. April Trees for their guidance and suggestions; Jordan Soliz, Kimo Ah Yun, and Stephanie Tomlinson for their editorial support; and Elissa Arterburn, Eve-Anne Doohan, Erica Erland, Andrew Gault, Marita Gronvoll, Emily Lamb, Cassandra LeClair-Underberg, Meredith Marko, Aimee Miller, Aaron Rabideau, and Paige Toller for their invaluable help in coding and rating the data. The author also wishes to acknowledge and thank Alan Sillars and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful input.

Notes

This paper is based on the author's dissertation study and was presented on the Top Four Panel of the Family Communication Division at the National Communication Association Convention, November 2003, Miami, FL.

1. Three families in the study had nontraditional parent–child roles. One family consisted of a grandmother, a granddaughter, and an aunt, all of whom lived together and considered each other to be like mother and two daughters. Another family consisted of a mother, daughter, and a female friend of the daughter who lived with the family and identified as a daughter in that family. Finally, a third family consisted of an aunt and her niece and nephew. All three of the individuals in this family identified the aunt as the parent figure for the children. Of the 27 two parent–one child triads, 23 included father, mother, daughter combinations, and four included father, mother, son combinations. Of the 31 two child–one parent families, 11 consisted of a mother, son, and daughter, 11 included a mother and two daughters, one family was made up of one mother and two sons, two families included a father, a son, and a daughter, five families consisted of a father and two daughters, and one family was comprised of a father and two sons. In total, 35 fathers, with a mean age of 51 years (S.D.=10.76) participated in the study. Twenty-eight fathers were White, three fathers were Asian, and four fathers did not report their ethnicity. Fifty mothers participated in the study and identified themselves according the following ethnicities: 41 were White, one was African-American, five were Asian, two were Hispanic, and one did not report her ethnicity. Mothers reported a mean age of 48 years (S.D.=5.52). The children in the study—64 daughters and 20 sons—ranged in age between 14 and 41 with a mean age of 20 years (S.D.=2.89). Seventy-two reported their ethnicity as white, four as Hispanic, 10 as Asian, one as African-American, and one as East Indian. Using the tables provided by Cohen (1988), the sample of 58 families had sufficient statistical power to detect moderate effect sizes (e.g., r=.33)

2. Although asking families to tell a story that represents them and that they often tell may encourage more positively valenced stories (presumably because of their public nature), the choice was made to elicit stories in this way to (a) help families think of a family story, since families may have trouble selecting a story that best represents them based on this criteria alone; and (b) distinguish this type of story from a second story that was told about a difficult family experience (not relevant to the current study). Given the prevalence of the “stress” theme across this sample, however, it appears that this choice did not preclude families from sharing stories of negative experiences.

3. Although not tested in the current study due to the focus on family identity, identity statements were also coded for self-individual, self-coalition, other-individual, and other-coalition identity statements.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jody Koenig Kellas

Jody Koenig Kellas (Ph.D., University of Washington) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln