In a survey of 417 college students, Ledbdetter looked at the interrelationships between four main concepts:
- conversation orientation–how open the climate of communication is, and how encouraged the family members feel to talk about a large range of topics
- conformity orientation– how homogeneous the attitudes, values, and beliefs that the family maintains in its communication)
- relationship maintenance behaviors-the actions the family members engage in to keep the relationship in existence, which he then parsed into online and offline behaviors
- Friendship closeness
Using theories that describe how behavior modeling constitutes a primary factor in the socialization of how people communicate with others, his results provide further support for these notions. Strong conversation orientation predicted the use of both online and offline relational maintenance behaviors. Further, the use off offline relationship maintenance behaviors served as a mediating behavior between conversation orientation and friendship closeness (but interestingly online maintenance behaviors did not).
So, if interested in helping their children establish close friendships outside of the family, parents should strive to maintain a climate of open discussions with their children. Likewise, research has indicated that children in families with a high conformity orientation have trouble adjusting to major life changes such as college. Children developing and learning some intellectual flexibility is key, both in listening to information, but also in forming tactful messages to others.
Obviously, parents interested in never having their children leave their house should practice the conformity orientation.
On the technology front these findings provide support for research that myself and others have conducted that look at the impact of the medium, though my hunch is that over the next thirty or so years these effects will dissipate somewhat. Online relationships perform similarly to offline relationships if the online relationships have time to develop, and this could also explain why conformity relationships were found to be related to online maintenance behaviors but not offline behaviors; perhaps this lack flexibility is masked when one has a tighter control over the interaction. Online maintenance in concert with offline maintenance is strongly related to friendship closeness.
Ledbetter, A. M. (2009). Family communication patterns and relational maintenance behavior: Direct and mediated associations with friendship closeness. Human Communication Research, 35, 130-147.