Family Communication and its effects to Cross-Sex Friendship Maintenance of an Individual within a Nuclear Family
“Family Communication and its effects to Cross-Sex Friendship Maintenance of an Individual within a Nuclear Family”
By
Alexandra Llabore,
JonelAwit
Claudine Quintos
Polytechnic University of the Philippines – Sta. Mesa
CHAPTER I
The Problem and Its Background
This chapter serves as an overview of the study “Family Communication and its effects to Cross-Sex Friendship Maintenance of an Individual within a Nuclear Family.” It includes the introduction and background of the study, theoretical and conceptual framework, statement of the problem, objectives of the study, hypotheses, significance and limitations of the study, and the operational definitions.
Introduction
Family is the core unit of society. Whether defined as biological, legal, or sociological, comprises a large connotation on how an individual makes sense of the world. Every individual come from different types of family and desires to have the most pleasurable kind of family in the future so as to develop their interpersonal skills. As noted from (Fitzpatrick and Caughlin, 2002), “the family is where most of us learn to communicate and, even more important, where most of us learn how to think about communication.”
Family is an important unit because it plays an important role not only in the society but also in the vast world of communication. Family, in communication, was defined as to being a “fundamental source for learning basic interpersonal communication skills and rules” (Koerner& Fitzpatrick, 2002a, 2002b; Kunkel, Hummert, & Dennis, 2006; Whitchurch& Dickson, 1999).
These learned interpersonal communications skills serves as the foundation of the family in building their own structured culture. To support this idea, Reiss (1981) argued that “these value and belief systems have far-reaching consequences for how family members perceive their social environment and their family’s place in it and, as a consequence, how they communicate within it.”
As per stated by Le Poire (2005):
“Like families, however, definitions of communication are complex in that some definitions of communication include all types of behavior, even when no communicative intent was included. Some scholars find it important to recognize communication as contextualized—that is, communication within the family is different and distinct from other communication event because it is occurring within the family structure.” (page 12)
Thus, communication is central to familial relationships whatever type of communication exists, from nurtured and control to conflicts and struggles. Through this, communication patterns within the family is essential as it influences these core units of the society individually through behavioral and interactional ways such as that helping each member on socialization, relationship maintenance, and other interpersonal activities.
Furthermore, this study aims to determine how all these family communication patterns affect in the friendship maintenance of cross-sex friends.