Predicting family satisfaction from communication styles.

Liz Dickson

Family communication has been associated with significant and far reaching physiological, psychosocial, behavioural and cognitive outcomes. Despite family communication’s significance, research has been largely atheoretical and failed to adequately identify family communication’s role in family social/emotional climate. To address this disparity, a theoretically driven family communication approach was proposed. Two new scales were developed to facilitate research: the Personal Communication Scale (α = 0.80), which comprised two subscales, constructive communication (α = 0.87) and traditional communication (α = 0.86); and the Effective Family Communication Questionnaire (α = 0.98). An online survey was employed (N = 206) to examine the contribution of family communication to family climate; the predictive ability of the proposed family communication model; and the impact of different forms of communication. Results demonstrated that family communication was significantly associated with family climate rτ = 0.54, large effect, and that the proposed family communication model, predicted up to 65% of the variance in family climate/satisfaction. Constructive communication was shown to be associated with more emotion regulation, more effective family communication and more family satisfaction than traditional communication. Implications for family communication theory are discussed.

Predicting family satisfaction from communication styles.

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