A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Family Communication Patterns and Conflict Between Young Adults and Parents

Abstract

Young adults in Japan (n = 173) and the United States (n = 131) completed surveys including Ritchie and Fitzpatrick's (1990) revised family communication patterns instrument, Rahim's (1983) conflict styles scale modified for the family setting, and a family communication satisfaction measure. Individual preferences for each conflict strategy (i.e., integrating, compromising, dominating, obliging, and avoiding) were examined in relation to his or her cultural background and family communication patterns. Results showed that the consensual family type was most common in the United States, while the laissez-faire family type was most common in Japan. Across cultures, high conversation orientation was associated with the young adult's preference for integrating and compromising strategies in conflict with their parents, while high conformity orientation was associated with avoiding and obliging strategies. A strong positive correlation between conversation orientation and communication satisfaction was observed for both countries, while a strong negative correlation between conformity orientation and communication satisfaction was found for Americans. Possible explanations, implications and limitations of the studies are discussed.

Notes

¹ Oyserman et al. (2002) examined individualism and collectivism as two separate concepts and report that there is no difference between Japanese and Americans in collectivism scores, though the Japanese are lower in individualism scores. In addition, they report that the difference in individualism scores between Japan and the United States is highlighted when uniqueness and importance of privacy included in the measurements, but there are no differences when dominating is included in the measurement. The nature of the cultural difference between Japan and United States in a way each society perceives individualism and collectivism is beyond the scope of the current study.

²High/Low Context Communication is often not measured, but considered as one of the behavioral manifestation of individualism and collectivism in a way that individualistic society enjoys low context communication, while collectivistic society enjoys high context communication (Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey, 1988). Ohashi (2000) created high/low context communication scale and an evidence of Japan as high context culture and United States as low context culture (See Bresnahan, et al., 2002).

³ Maeda (2004) claims that Japanese people value filial piety still, though not as strongly emphasized as it was before WWII, attributing it to the militaristic regime's use of family metaphor to emphasis obligations of the people, Japan's economical successes after the war, and more stable social security structure.

⁴We adjusted p value for the study acknowledging the possible errors for multiple testing using 0.05/5 =0.01, instead of 0.05/35 = 0.00143, which would be based on the Bonferroni adjustment, due to our concern for overly inflating the type 2 error. This is discussed by other researchers such as Seldmeier & Gigerenzer (1989).