MARIAL | Faculty, Fellows and Staff

JENNIFER BOHANEK
MARIAL Sloan Center
Research Activities
Emory University

Project title: CO-CONSTRUCTED AND INDEPENDENT NARRATIVES AND ADOLESCENT WELL-BEING

My dissertation project is part of the larger Family Narratives Project being conducted in collaboration with Dr. Robyn Fivush and Dr. Marshall Duke. The guiding theoretical assumption underlying the Family Narratives project is that the emotionality and coherence of family narratives will predict the level of emotional and psychological well-being in the family. The ways in which families talk about past events allows a glimpse into how the family functions as a whole, as well as into how the individual members of the family relate to one another. It is the process of interaction and co-construction of family narratives that is critical to the present study.

We collected data from 40 families two years ago, and are now in the process of collecting follow-up data from as many of the original families as possible. In 33 of the original families, both parents worked outside the home, and 7 families had a single income. We specifically targeted families with a child between the ages of 9-12 with the hope that identifying different patterns of family communication in the years immediately prior to adolescence may help us to understand which patterns of family communication may buffer children from the possible problems associated with adolescence and the development of self-identity. We were also interested in whether family communication differences existed between the dual- and single-earner families, and how this might affect family life and child well-being.

We have coded the family narratives narratives from the first time point to reflect 5 interaction styles that families use when co-constructing their narratives: collaborative, child-centered, disconnected, facilitated-moderated, and disharmonious. We have found some suggestive relations between the ways in which families co-construct narratives and the child's concurrent behavior/well-being, and we are now in the process of relating the co-construction of family narratives at Time 1 to child outcome and the development of the child's own independent narratives at Time 2. Overall, we predict that the emotionality, coherence, and completeness of the family narratives at Time 1 will influence the both the well-being of the child, as well as the emotionality, coherence, and completeness of the independent child narratives, at Time 2.

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