Family Communication

  There are many different aspects of human communication and many ways to study the area that appeals to you.  An area that fascinates me is family communication studies.  I want to learn more about the ways in which we communicate with those closest to us, our families.  I believe that studying this aspect of communication can be beneficial to me in many aspects of my life beyond my immediate family.
  To study family communication I would choose a social constructionist model.  I chose this model because it focuses on how we communicate through our culture, and that we define our world by the communication that is relevant to us within our own social perspective.  The social constructionist perspective emphasizes symbolic codes, cultural traditions, cognitive customs, and shared roles and rules.  I think that this way of thinking would be a good way to study family communication because it focuses on your surroundings, traditions and values that make you see things the way that you do, which then directly effects how you communicate.  For example in our textbook there is a brief story about a man named John who was brought up in a time that you could say anything you want to women in the workplace.  He gets a reality check when Judy shows up "fresh out of college" where she was taught behavior like that is unacceptable.  I would be willing to bet if you explored John's family background his father would have some of the same behaviors towards women, and his mother would think nothing of those behaviors because that was simply the norm in those days. 
  I believe that the way you act and present yourself has a lot to do with the way you were brought up and the way that your family acts.  This is why family communication fascinates me.  I think that the social constructivist perspective is excellent at analyzing how it is that different families communicate, how family communication is different in other cultures, and how we can improve our communication in a family setting by understanding some of the customs and norms of that family.