The transition from adolescence to adulthood involves a relational renegotiation that, at least in part, is reflected in communication. This study describes the communication difficulties that older adolescents felt they had experienced with their parents and explored whether those communication problems or the perceived qualities of the problems are more strongly associated with relational satisfaction. Results indicated that the most frequent type of current communication problem involved personal criticism. Past problems were more likely to focus on parent-adolescent tensions related to behavioral restriction. There were few significant differences between very satisfied and dissatisfied adolescents in terms of the types of difficulties reported. However, older adolescents' attributions for their past and present communication problems significantly predicted their current satisfaction. Particularly notable is the finding that the specific type of problem experienced by adolescents may contribute substantially less to their satisfaction with parents than the ways they interpret the problems.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Adams, G. R.
, & Gullotta, T. (1983). Adolescent life experiences. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.
2.
Bloom, M. V.
(1980). Adolescent-parental separation. New York: Gardner.
3.
Blos, P.
(1979). The second individuation process of adolescence. In P. Blos (Ed.), The adolescent passage: Developmental issues (pp. 141-170). New York: International University Press.
4.
Blyth, D.
, Hill, J. P., & Thiel, K. (1982). Early adolescents' significant others: Grade and gender differences in perceived relationships with familial adults and your people. Journal of Youth andAdolescence, 4,425-450.
5.
Bulmer, M.
(1979). Concepts in the analysis of qualitative data. Sociological Review, 27, 651-677.
6.
Coleman, J. C.
(1978). Current contradictions in adolescent theory. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 7, 1-11.
7.
Coleman, J. S.
(1961). The adolescent society. New York: Free Press.
8.
Douvan, E.
, & Adelson, J. (1966). The adolescent experience. New York: Wiley.
9.
Duck, S. W.
, (1990). Relationships as unfinished business: Out of the frying pan and into the 1990s. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 7, 5-28.
10.
Elkind
, (1984). All grown up and no place to go: Teenagers in crisis. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
11.
Ellis-Schwabe, M.
, & Thomburg, H. D. (1986). Conflict areas between parents and their adolescents. Journal of Psychology, 120, 59-68.
12.
Erikson, E. H.
(1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. New York: Norton.
13.
Fincham, F. D.
, & Bradbury, T. N. (1987a). Cognitive processes and conflict in close relationships: An attribution-efficacy model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 1106-1118.
14.
Fincham, F. D.
, & Bradbury, T. N. (1987b). The assessment of marital quality: A reevaluation. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 49, 797-748.
15.
Fincham, F. D.
, & Bradbury, T. N. (1988). The impact of attributions on marriage: Empirical and conceptual foundations. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 27, 77-90.
16.
Gottman, J.
(1979). Marital interaction: Experimental investigations. New York: Academic Press.
17.
Gottman, J. M.
, & Krokoff, L. J. (1989). Marital interaction and satisfaction: A longitudinal view. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 57, 47-52.
18.
Gottman, J.
, Markman, H., & Notarius, C. (1977). The topography of marital conflict: A sequential analysis of verbal and nonverbal behavior. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 39,461-477.
19.
Grotevant, H. D.
, & Cooper, C. R. (1986). Individuation in family relationships: A perspective on individual differences in the development of identity and role-taking skill in adolescence. Human Development, 29, 82-100.
20.
Guetzkow, H.
(1950). Unitizing and categorizing problems in coding qualitative dataJournal of Clinical Psychology, 6, 47-58.
21.
Hamilton, D. L.
, & Huffman, L. F. (1975). Generality of impression-formation processes for evaluative and non-evaluative judgments. Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology, 20, 200-207.
22.
Harvey, J. H.
, Hendrick, S. S., & Tucker, K. (1988). Self-report methods in studying personal relationships. In S. W. Duck (Ed.), Handbook of personal relationships (pp. 99-113). New York: Wiley.
23.
Huston, T. L.
, McHale, S. M., & Crouter, A. C. (1986). When the honeymoon's over: Changes in the marriage relationship over the first year. In R. Gilmour & S. Duck (Eds.), The emerging field of personal relationships (pp. 109-132). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
24.
Huston, T. L.
, & Vangelisti, A. L. (1991). Socioemotional behavior and satisfaction in marital relationships: A longitudinal study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 721-733.
25.
Kellermann, K.
(1988). The negativity effect in interaction: It's all in your point of view. Human Communication Research, 16, 147-183.
26.
Kenniston, K.
(1970). Youth: A "new" stage of life. American Scholar, 39, 631-654.
27.
Larson, R. W.
(1983). Adolescents' daily experience with family and friends: Contrasting opportunity systems. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 45, 739-750.
28.
Locke, H. J.
, & Wallace, K. M. (1959). Short marital-adjustment and prediction tests: Their reliability and validity. Marriage and Family Living, 21, 251-255.
29.
Montemayor, R.
(1983). Parents and adolescents in conflict: All families some of the time and some families most of the time. Journal of EarlyAdolescence, 3, 83-103.
30.
Montemayor, R.
(1986). Family variation in parent-adolescent storm and stress. Journal of Adolescent Research, 1, 15-31.
31.
Montemayor, R.
, & Hanson, E. (1985). A naturalistic view of conflict between adolescents and their parents and siblings. Journal of EarlyAdolescence, 5, 23-30.
32.
Nisbett, R.
, & Ross, L. (1980). Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
33.
Noller, P.
(1985). Negative communication in marriage. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2, 289-301.
34.
Norton, R.
(1983). Measuring marital quality: A critical look at the dependent variable. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 45, 141-151.
35.
Offer, D.
(1969). The psychological world of the teenager. New York: Basic Books.
36.
Offer, D.
, Ostrov, E., & Howard, K. (1981). The adolescent: A psychological self-portrait. New York: Basic Books.
37.
Olson, D. H.
(1977). Insiders' and outsiders' views of relationships: Research strategies. In G. Levinger & H. Raush (Eds.), Close relationships (pp. 115-135). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
38.
Olson, D. H.
, McCubbin, H. I., Barnes, H. L, Larsen, A. S., Muxen, M. J., & Wilson, M. A. (1983). Families: What makes them work. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
39.
Papini, D. R.
, Clark, S., Barnett, J. K., & Savage, C. L. (1989). Grade, pubertal status, and gender-related variations in conflictual issues among adolescents. Adolescence, 24,977-987.
40.
Papini, D. R.
, & Sebby, R. A. (1987). Adolescent pubertal status and affective family relationships: A multivariate assessment. Journal of Youth andAdolescence, 16,3-15.
41.
Papini, D. R.
, Sebby, R. A., & Clark, S. (1989). Affective quality of family relations and adolescent identity exploration. Adolescence, 24,457-466.
42.
Planalp, S.
, & Honeycutt, J. M. (1985). Events that increase uncertainty in personal relationships. Human Communication Research, 11, 593-604.
43.
Prinz, R. J.
, Foster, S., Kent, R. N., & O'Leary, K. D. (1979). Multivariate assessment of conflict in distressed and nondistressed mother-adolescent dyads. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 12,691-700.
44.
Rawlins, W. K.
, & Holl, M. R. (1988). Adolescents' interaction with parents and friends: Dialectics of temporal perspective and evaluation. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 5, 27-46.
45.
Ross, M.
, & Sicoly, F. (1979). Egocentric biases in availability and attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37,322-336.
46.
Smetana, J. G.
(1988). Adolescents' and parents' conceptions of parental authority. Child Development, 59, 321-335.
47.
Smetana, J. G.
(1989). Adolescents' and parents' reasoning about actual family conflict. Child Development, 60, 1052-1067.
48.
Storms, M. D.
(1973). Videotape and the attribution process: Reversing actors' and observers' points of view. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27, 165-175.
49.
Sullivan, K.
, & Sullivan, A. (1980). Adolescent-parent separation. Developmental Psychology, 16, 93-99.
50.
Surra, C. A.
, & Ridley, C. (1991). Multiple perspectives on interaction: Participants, peers and observers. In B. M. Montgomery & S. W. Duck (Eds.), Studying interpersonal interaction (pp. 35-55). New York: Guilford.
51.
Taylor, S. E.
, & Fiske, S. T. (1975). Point of view and perceptions of causality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 439-445.
52.
Taylor, S. E.
, & Fiske, S. T. (1978). Salience, attention, and attribution: Top of the head phenomena. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 11, pp. 249-288). New York: Academic Press.
53.
Thornburg, H. D.
(1981). The amount of sex information learning obtained during early adolescence. Journal of Early Adolescence, 1, 171-183.
54.
Varenne, H.
(1979). Jocks and freaks: The symbolic structure of the expression of social interaction among American senior high school students. In G. Spindler (Ed.), Doing the ethnography of schooling (pp. 210-235). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
