Abstract
Despite the explosion of stepfamily communication research over the past 40 years, we still know little about how members of new stepfamilies manage their evolving relationships with extended kin. In particular, stepchildren face the challenge of getting to know new extended stepfamily members, yet society provides no social prescriptions for how to navigate interactions with people who stepchildren suddenly have familial ties to, yet share little to no history with. To investigate this relationship, I interviewed forty young adult stepchildren and conducted an interpretive analysis of the interviews, using Relational Dialectics Theory to frame the data. Two discursive struggles, stranger-family and separateness-connectedness, emerged from participants' talk of their relationship with the new extended stepfamily. Participants also described occasions of skirting sites of struggles through aesthetic moments and authoritative discourses. Implications are discussed.
Journal Title
Iowa Journal of Communication
Volume
49
Issue
1
First Page
4
Last Page
21
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
DiVerniero, Rebecca
(2017)
"Discursive Struggles in Communication with Extended Stepfamily Members,"
Iowa Journal of Communication: Vol. 49:
No.
1, Article 4.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ijc/vol49/iss1/4
Copyright
©2017 Iowa Communication Association
