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Discourse-Dependent

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Members rely on communication strategies to manage their family boundaries

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Internal boundary management

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using communication strategies to create and maintain members' internal sense of we-ness

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External boundary management

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using communication strategies to reveal or conceal information about the family to outsiders

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Internal Boundary Examples

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Naming, Discussing, Narrating, and Ritualizing

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External Boundary Examples

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Labeling, Explaining, Legitimizing, Defending

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Family Definition (from Text)

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Networks of people who share their lives over long periods of time bound by ties of marriage, blood, or commitment, legal or otherwise, who consider themselves as family and who share a significant history and anticipated future of functioning in a family relationship

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Extended family

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Also known as the "intergenerational family" Definition: refer to that group of relatives living within a nearby geographical area

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Solo parent family

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Definition: one parent carrying out all parental obligations while ongoing involvement with the other parent is precluded.

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Constitutive approach

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Definition: - creating family challenges the conception of one dominant form of family life

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Stepfamily

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Definition: refers to families formed through merging existing family units - Stepfamily consists of two adults and children, not all of whom are from the union of the adult's relationship.

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Open adoption

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Definition: allowing long term connections between birth mothers and adoptive parents, creating new types of extended families with communication challenges - Today, most all domestic adoptions are "open"

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Role lens

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Relationships are familial to the extent that relational partners feel and act like family - this establishes social behavior and emotion

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Functional families

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1. Normal Families as asymptomatic family functioning 2. Normal Families as average 3. Normal Families as optimal 4. Normal Families processes

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Normal Families as asymptomatic family functioning

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implies that family members exhibit no major symptoms of psychopathology

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Normal Families as average

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addresses families that appear typical or fit common patterns

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Normal Families as optimal

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describes ideal or positive characteristics, sometimes reflecting members' accomplishments

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Normal Families processes

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assumes a systems perspective addressing adaptation across the life cycle and management of stresses and diversity contexts

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Involuntary relationships

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Stepfamilies are an example of this - people chose to have relationships with new spouse but, might not choose the stepkids

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Cohesion

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emotional bonding that family members experience with each other

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Flexibility/Adaptability

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the amount of change in a family's leadership, role relationships, and relationship rules

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Cohesion Continuum

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Disengaged Connected Cohesive Enmeshed

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Disengaged

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family members maintain extreme separateness and independence, experiencing little belonging or loyalty

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Connected

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family members experience emotional independence as well as some sense of involvement and belonging

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Cohesive

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family members strive for emotional closeness, loyalty, and togetherness with emphasis on some individuality

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Enmeshed

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family members experience extreme closeness, loyalty, dependence, and almost no individuality

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Flexibility/Adaptability Continuum

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Rigid Structured Flexible Chaotic

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Rigid

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family members experience very low levels of change, as well as authoritarian leadership and strict roles and rules

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Structured

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family members experience more moderate levels of change as well as limited share decision-making and leadership and relatively stable roles and rules

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Flexible

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family members experience high levels of change, shared decision-making, and shifting rules and roles

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Chaotic

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family members experience very high levels of change as well as nonexistent leadership and confused and very variable rules and roles

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Boundaries

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exist between and among members and between the family and the outside world

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Transactional communication/family systems perspectives

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complements each other because both share a relational focus. When trying to understand family dynamics, relationships take procedure over individuals.

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Where families with adolescents function best-

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They function best when they have average cohesion, being neither enmeshed with parents of disengaged and when their adaptability is midway between rigidity and chaos.

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Flexibility continuum-

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ranging from extremely low adaptability to extremely high adaptability.

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Supporting/secondary functions

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Supporting family functions include establishing a satisfactory congruence of images, evolving modes of interaction into central family themes, establishing the boundaries of the family's world of experience, managing significant biosocial issues of family life, such as gender, age, power and roles.

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Three dimensions in circumplex model

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Cohesion, adaptability, and communication.

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Dialectical tensions

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Relational dialectics refers to the both/and quality of relationships or the need for partners to simultaneously experience independence and connection or openness and privacy.

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Dialectical tensions Example

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Money/religion example- what can you talk about to family

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Family themes

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theme represents a pattern of feelings, motives, fantasies, and conventionalized understandings grouped around a particular locus of concern, which has a particular form in the personalities of individual members.

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Gendered familial expectations

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subtle and surprising. Gender identity and physical development issues affect styles of interaction and vice versa.

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Multigenerational systems

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• Develop mutual influence processes involving individuals born into or raised within them • Appear similar to but more complex than other human systems, experience developmental changes • Develop patterns that are shared, transformed, and manifested in future generation • Develop and transmit issues that may appear only in certain contexts and may be at unconscious levels • Develop cross-generation and within generation boundaries • Develop functional and dysfunctional patterns reflecting the intergenerational patterns and current circumstances

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Genograms

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provides one way to envision intergenerational transmissions- multigenerational family tree that depicts familial relationships visually.

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Shared meanings

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purpose of creating shared meaning & relationships. Better understand relationships.

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Metacommunication

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communication within communication. People communicate about their communication.

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Biosocial issues

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families operate within a larger community and cultural sphere that provides conventional norms for coping with biosocial issues of gender, age, power, and roles.

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Complex relationships

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systems embedded in systems create a highly complex set of structures and interaction patterns and may be understood in relation to each other

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Openness

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each family operates within the larger ecosystem, which includes legal, educational, political, health, and economic systems, as well as extended family and friendship systems

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Systems Perspective

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provides valuable insight into a family's communication patterns.

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Rules

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relationship agreements, often unconscious, that prescribe and limit a family member's behavior over time; they are capable of creating regularity out of chaos.

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Change-Promoting feedback

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processes result in recalibration of the system at a different level. Enables the system to grow, create, innovate, and change.

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Dialectical Struggles

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the dialectical struggles between family members keep a family system at some level of imbalance or flux. - are ongoing

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Calibration

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The function of maintaining stability in a system. It implies checking and, if necessary correcting the range of acceptable behaviors.

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Interactive complexity

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each act triggers new behavior as well as responds to previous behaviors, rendering pointless any attempts to assign cause and effect

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Symbolic interaction

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- Assumes that humans think about and act according to the meanings they attribute to their actions and social contexts - Assumes humans are motivated to create meanings to help them make sense of the world and we do this through language - Focuses on the connection between symbols, or shared meanings, and interactions, via verbal and nonverbal communication

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Interdependence

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the behavior of each family member is related to and dependent on the behavior of the others

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Communication and the Systems Perspective

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each family member creates a context for other members, each family member simultaneously creates and interprets messages for others, and each family member affects and is affected by all other family members.

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Punctuation

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refers to the interruption of the sequence of behavior at different intervals in order to give it meaning to indicate "things started here".

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Wholeness

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the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

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Social Constructionism

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People make sense of the world by constructing their own model of the social world and how it works. - Language is viewed as critical to human society. - Conversation serves to create and maintain reality. - Places a unique focus on how meanings are created and negotiated in specific contexts, rather than significantly influenced by societal norms or expectations

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Narrative theory

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humans experience life in narrative form and find personal meanings for their stories through interpretation, not objective observation.

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Privacy Dilemma

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1. The confidant may believe the teller will be harmed if the information is not revealed 2. The private information may be revealed accidently 3. Illicit activity might be revealed by accident 4. A family member may encounter information that places him or her in a dilemma

Chapters 1-3 Family Com – Flashcards

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