Dynamic goal processes: an agenda for interpersonal communication research

ABSTRACT

A longstanding tradition in communication research is that people have goals for communicative encounters. Communication research has evolved to better acknowledge that goals are malleable and can change during interactions. Drawing upon the history of communication goals theorizing and research, we elaborate three properties emerging from the juxtaposition of goals and time. We then explore theoretical accounts of goal change and options for data acquisition. We end with speculation on how goal dynamics might stimulate new questions about interpersonal communication and, perhaps, move the field into a new phase of inquiry.

KEYWORDS:

• Goals
• interaction dynamics
• goal variability
• interpersonal communication
• methodology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sociocultural or social-psychological approaches to goals reflect different epistemological assumptions than psychological approaches (O'Keefe, 1992). Broadly, these approaches locate goals in situations rather than in communicators’ minds. They therefore adopt a third-party perspective, according to which conventional goals are identified by the investigator based on theoretically-derived expectations about which goals are or ought to be relevant to a particular situation, rather than which personal goals communicators themselves consider important. Although there is much merit in these approaches, our review focuses specifically on individuals’ self-understandings of their goals.

2 Goal fluctuation can be operationalized using several metrics, such as within-person variance or standard deviation of a goal over time, or the formula in Worley and Samp (2018a). One measure that should not be used is the standard error. Standard deviations quantify variability in goals within a sample, whereas standard errors estimate the relation between the sample and population means of a goal, and are heavily dependent on sample size.

3 By ‘relational’ processes, we refer to features of the relationship as a dyadic entity, rather than to simply ‘relational’ communication or the process of relating.