Relational struggles and experiential immediacy in religious American families.

Abstract

Qualitative family scholar Kerry Daly has called for more theory addressing understudied dimensions including religion, everyday experiences, and time. Herein we address all three of these dimensions as we empirically examine and theorize on relational struggles among religious families. We also explore what we term experiential immediacy-defined as the personal and temporal proximity to participantreported lived experience. Based on qualitative analyses of in-depth interviews with 198 highly religious families (N ϭ 476 individuals), we identified four types of relational struggles created by religious involvement: burdens, disunities, abuses, and offenses. We also offer a conceptual framework of experiential immediacy grounded in the findings and explore how personal and temporal immediacy of remembered, present, and possible experiences and quality of experience relate to relational struggles created by religious involvement. We also suggest implications for research based on our findings and concepts.

Exploring Relational Reconciliation Processes in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Families

“…Identifying ways that family members can transform family relationships without clinical intervention has the potential to improve family life for many people. Most people are religious, and although religion can harm relationships (Dollahite & Marks, ; Dollahite, Marks, & Young, ; Mahoney, ), the influence of religion is mostly positive for family relationships (Marks & Dollahite, ; Mahoney ; Walsh, ). On a broader scale, beyond family relationships, a better understanding of positive ways religious beliefs support processes of relational reconciliation may also be useful for bridging cultural divisions and facilitating cultural and societal reconciliation.…”

Why Religion Helps and Harms Families: A Conceptual Model of a System of Dualities at the Nexus of Faith and Family Life

“…These biases need to be addressed and, to the degree possible, checked or countered (see Daly, ). Indeed, the present article is a part of a sustained and systematic effort on our part to challenge and counter our own native biases by actively seeking for and reporting data regarding how and why religion can harm or generate struggles in family relationships (Dollahite et al, in press). Accordingly, we note that all three authors are active participants in our faith communities.…”

“…We have used a variety of qualitative methods (typically involving grounded theory but also theory‐guided coding) to try to understand these linkages. One of the most important discoveries from these analyses is that—despite the fact that our sample consisted of highly religious people who were recommended to us by religious leaders as exemplars of strong families in their congregations—there were inherent tensions, conflicts, and challenges within marriages and families (Dollahite et al, in press) and between highly religious families and the surrounding culture (Marks, Dollahite, & Young, ). We identified the paradoxes mentioned earlier as well as additional dualities (sample description, coding process, and data summary table are included as Supplementary Material with the online version of this article).…”

“…This complexity suggests that the road toward managing dualities in religious families typically will involve a variety of challenges requiring complex processes to resolve them. We take up several of these issues in detail in other recent work (Dollahite et al, in press; Dollahite & Marks, ).…”

“…Much of the research literature investigating connections between religion and families has produced conflicting outcomes, partly because some scholars tend to investigate the benefits while others focus on the ways religion can be toxic to individuals and families (Marks & Dollahite, ). Social science evidence indicates that religion can be both a boon and a bane to individuals, couples, families, communities, cultures, and nations (Burr, Marks, & Day, ; Dollahite, Marks, & Young, in press; Marks & Dollahite, ; Mahoney, Pargament, Tarakeshwar, & Swank, ; Pargament & Mahoney, ; Stark, ). Why does religion result in both great good and horrific harm?…”