Hi there. I’m the Marsh in Braithwaite, Marsh, Tschamp-Diesing, and Leach’s research on Family kinkeepers from 2017. Family kinkeepers enact an important role centered on interaction and maintaining family relationships. We studied kinkeeping communication in light of mediated communication, topics engaged, and kinkeepers’ assessments. We worked with thirty-four self-identified kinkeepers, who kept an interaction diary over a 2-week span. We created 275 reports within 1,487 interactions where they usually had a large amount of mediated communications between them and their family members via text, telephone, e-mail, and social media. These interactions centered on everyday activities, rituals, health and safety. And despite potential complications of their role, most of the kinkeepers reported a high agreement and overall openness with family members, very little conflict, and overall satisfaction with these interactions. Implications of our findings, and new directions for researchers, and the important mediated role of family kinkeeping are discussed later in our article. We welcome you to read through it for yourself and see all that actually a kinkeeper does for their family.
Flashcards
Accounts
refer to other kinds of narratives that provide explanations or reasons for people’s behaviors or situations
Chilling effect
refers to the tendency of individuals to withhold complaints and avoid confrontation with their partner or with other family members for fear of reprisal, compared two potential explanations for how expressions of coercive power influence decisions to conceal secrets.
Communication rules
are relationship agreements that highlight ” what behaviors are required, preferred, or prohibited in various social contexts.”
Constitutive rules
define ” what counts as what” and help family members understand why they should not do or say something
Family network
refers to a group of people within a family system who have established a pattern of connecting through social interaction.
Family secrets
involve information purposefully hidden or concealed by one or more family members.
Horizontal communication
occurs when the persons involved in the interaction possess equal status or power, as when siblings share messages or when parents and adult children work out problems together.
Master narratives
is a story of extraordinary proportions that is known to all members of the family and that serves to define what it means to be a family member
Networked families
use a wide range of mediated channels to develop, enact, and change family relationships.
Regulative rules
prescribe acceptable communication behavior: how, when, where, and with whom to talk
Relational culture
a shared set of meanings, expectations, and rules for interaction that contributes to creating a relatively unique communication system
Stories
can be defined as narratives that provide a history or re-telling of what was experienced by family members.
Transactional patterns
are ways in which each member of the family motivates and monitors the behavior of the other and is influenced, in turn, by the other person’s previous actions
Vertical communication
occurs when real or imagined power differences characterize the interactions.
