MARIAL
profile:
Robyn Fivush
By Elizabeth Kurylo
When Robyn Fivush and Marshall Duke began collaborating
on a research project, they decided to collect data by asking families
to tape record dinner time conversations. If they had it to do over, they
might consider asking them to tape record conversations in the car. It
seems that many of today’s working families rarely have dinner together,
but they do spend a lot of time in the car.
“We chose dinner time conversations because we thought
that at the end of the day, families came together at the table to talk
about how the day was,” said Fivush, a psychology professor and core
faculty member of the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life
(MARIAL). “Most of the families said to us, well, we don’t really
eat dinner together that often.
Despite the challenges, Fivush and Duke, also a psychology
professor and core faculty member of MARIAL, have been able to study 40
metro Atlanta families in an effort to determine how they tell important
family stories together. They hope to demonstrate that how family members
tell stories about important events in their lives has an important effect
on children.
Each family is asked to complete a series of questionnaires
that help assess how well the family functions. In addition, children
are asked questions that measure their well-being. The children in the
study are age 9-12. Each family is asked to talk about two shared events,
one emotionally positive and one emotionally negative, and then they are
given a tape recorder and asked to record several dinner time conversations
over the succeeding few weeks.
“The positive experiences are what you’d expect;
family vacations, Disney World, holidays,” said Fivush, who was recently
named distinguished professor. “The negative events are very, very
variable,” ranging from the death of a pet to the violent or accidental
death of a family member or neighbor.
When she studies these recordings, Fivush is interested
in how the family members recount the event. “Do they share in the
telling of the story, or is there one person who sort of tells the story
and dictates, no this is the way it happened. How much co-constructed
or shared storytelling is going on? How much validation of people’s
viewpoints and opinions is going on?”
She also is looking at how families deal with emotion. “Particularly
with these more stressful experiences, how do you deal with the negative
emotion that people express about it? How is that emotion talked about
and resolved? In some families, you are not allowed to talk about emotion.
In other families, there can be extremes. People say you should talk about
things, and that’s true, but it’s not good to sort of ruminate.
You want to be able to talk about your feelings, but you also want to
be able to provide some kind of resolution for those negative emotions.”
She expects to find that families who tell “more shared
stories, more emotionally balanced stories” will also show better
family functioning on the standard clinical measures. She also expects
to find that the kids will be showing less symptoms of having any kind
of problems.
Although her research is in the early stage, Fivush has already found
some surprises. One is that the traditional, nuclear family of mom, dad
and kids is no longer the norm.
“There are few nuclear working families. That’s
just not the norm. They are dealing with so many issues. Many of them
are blended families or they, for one reason or another, have other people
living in the house with them,” she said, adding that of the families
she is studying, the majority fit a non-traditional definition.
Today’s families also are overscheduled, she said.
“Even the moms who are not working outside the home are doing all
this carpooling, the kids have to go here and there. It’s just amazing.”
The moms who do work feel guilty that they are not spending
enough time with their children, who they think may somehow be damaged
by the time they spend in the care of others. In fact, research shows
that most children in quality child care programs adjust well. In addition,
she said, “Girls growing up, particularly with mothers who work outside
the home, have higher self-esteem. The research bears that out.”
Media images often have a way of eroding the confidence
of working mothers, though. “This myth of this family where mom comes
home from work and cooks this wonderful dinner and everybody sits down
and has this wonderful conversation over dinner together is only increasing
women’s guilt,” she said.
Fivush is hopeful that her research can eventually provide
a guide for families that would help them communicate better.
“We’d like to be able to say this is how families interact, and this is why it’s important that families talk about these kinds of things,” she said. “We believe we’ll find that its important to understand how you talk about these things.”
Dr. Robyn Fivush, professor of psychology and core faculty member of the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life
