Contact Information: Michael Dues 520-626-3064 [email protected]
Personal Trauma May Alter Relationships Critical Communication Context
A major illness or disability often not only changes everything for an individual who has gone through such an event. It also can likely disrupt that person's relationships.
Researchers at The University of Arizona in Tucson suggest that such life-altering events cast relationships into a "critical communication context," where lines of communication suddenly have to be redefined.
Michael Dues, a professor of communication at the UA, and co-authors Mary Brown and Michael Peters, are studying groups of people who have gone through personal trauma. Brown and Peters are UA doctoral students. The group reported their findings at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association in New York on Nov. 21 and 22.
Dues, Brown and Peters are in the initial phases of their research, currently studying people with spinal cord injuries or substance abuse addiction who are dealing with their disabilities in focus groups.
"What that puts you in is a situation where your own self-identity is up in the air," Dues said. "You have to redefine who you are in some very basic ways."
Dues said that often includes renegotiating close personal relationships -- spouses, children, parents, friends -- that now suddenly are up in the air as well. It creates a context that requires adroit communication skills at the interpersonal level. No small feat when you are scared and suffering from your own problems.
"When people are reassessing each other (at this level), we think the stakes are highly magnified," Dues said.
"Our current objective is to ground our thoughts with good, rich descriptions of what the experience of this is like, provided by people who are going through it. Before we elaborate into any full-blown theory, and start doing experimental studies, we really need to check our thought out with real people living through what we're trying to write about, to ground our theory in their real experience."
Michael Peters is the lead author on the paper, Critical Communication Contexts: Individual and Relational Adaptation, and coined the term "critical communication context." He also is applying the construct to people who have experienced traumatic injury or physical illness.
Mary Brown was the lead author on the paper, Managing Identities and Relationships in Health Care Contexts. Her area of research is studying people recovering from substance addiction.
Dues and the others question their focus groups about communicating in their relationships: how could they have communicated better; how could the significant other have communicated better; and what successes did they have communicating with the significant other?
The questions are designed to get subjects to focus on their shortcomings, how they could have done better at communicating, and what they did well. What Dues and the others are finding is that emotions tend often to be large and overwhelming to the point of not being able to communicate them effectively.
"In the larger picture, we are convinced that relational communication and health are connected," says Mary Brown of the researchers' long-term goals. "What we want to do is find a conceptual framework that will provide a unified approach to intervention for people. Can we teach them communication skills that will increase the positive outcome and possibly even save lives?"
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