Family members' communication about health has a significant impact on issues of obtaining social support, avoiding stigma, and seeking and receiving appropriate medical treatment and care. A Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theoretical perspective was used to analyze 85 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with parents and one of their adolescent children in 40 families. Findings reveal intergenerational motivations and strategies for managing individual and collective privacy boundaries around health information and the consequences of this management for individuals and families. Motivations include protecting personal privacy, preventing stress, and soliciting social support. Strategies for boundary management include humor and topic avoidance. Implications for future research in the areas of privacy management, health, and family relationships are discussed.
Parents are powerful socialization agents for children and as children reach adolescence parental role models, among other sources of influence, become particularly salient in adolescents’ decision-making regarding initiation of substance use. Open parent-adolescent communication about substances is associated with less substance use by adolescents; however, it is unclear how youth interpret anti-drug use messages from their parents, especially if the parents engage in legal and/or illicit substance use themselves. Framed by social learning theory and social constructionism, this study analyzed in-depth interviews with 108 adolescents about personal experiences with substance use, family communication about substance use, and adolescent interpretations of parental use. Emergent themes in the data include: positive parental influence, parental
contradictions, and negative outcomes of use. Prevalence of parental use—regardless of legality, rarity of explicit communication about parental use, and various interpretations of parental use are discussed.
Parents and children in families must manage private information about sensitive topics. This privacy management can necessitate both individual and collective privacy rules. However, parents and children may have significantly different views of individual and collective privacy boundaries and rules for managing them. Particularly for adolescents, changing expectations and privacy needs may lead to different perceptions of privacy rules, with various relational consequences. To better understand parents’ and children’s perceptions of privacy rules in the family, this study analyzed individual interviews with 41 parent–adolescent dyads to provide a crystallized view of privacy rules in families. Parents’ and adolescents’ perceptions of privacy management both converged and diverged in this study, and reflected the nature of the parent–child relationships. When privacy rules could not be reconciled, there were both relational and privacy management implications.
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