(Re)Negotiating Our Relationship: How Contradictions Emerge in Sibling Privacy Boundaries

ABSTRACT

Sibling relationships go through a period of change when one or both of the siblings becomes an emerging adult and moves out of the family home. Through a communication privacy management lens, we can begin to understand how communication during this transition period is (re)negotiated and used to deidentify from the family while still maintaining a sense of connection with the family unit. Sibling communication during this life stage provides greater understanding for how siblings are choosing to communicate once the relationship has become more voluntary in nature. Through an interpretive analysis, several patterns related to how siblings negotiate privacy rules emerged. The themes we identified—rules, co-ownership, and permeable boundaries—all represented ways in which siblings communicated privacy negotiation as being contradictory. These contradictions provide a foundation for more closely examining how siblings are using privacy management and communicating in ways that highlight the extent to which they connect privacy management to closeness in the sibling relationship.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication
• contradiction
• emerging adulthood
• privacy management
• rules
• siblings