Communal coping and relational turbulence between emerging adult children and their surviving parent after the experience of parental/partner death
Creators: name: Jones, Hannah E.
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2024

description: One of the most challenging transitions families face is the death of a parent/partner. The death of a parent/partner disrupts the surviving parent and child’s life and contributes to a wide array of stressors that can significantly impact relationship functioning for the surviving dyad. Relational turbulence theory argues that when dyads are faced with transitions in their relationships these transitions have the potential to create changes in roles and routines. In turn, these circumstances amplify questions about relational involvement, disrupt or alter interdependence patterns, polarize communication, and allow for relational turbulence. The stressors parents and emerging adult children experience after parental/partner death are ripe for the experience of relational turbulence. Although parental/partner death marks an extraordinarily challenging time for the surviving dyad, there is also potential for parents and children to work together to adjust to the death and enact coping behaviors. This notion is reflected in the extended theoretical model of communal coping which illustrates how dyads and small groups enact coping strategies to navigate stressors. Given this logic, this dissertation advances 13 hypotheses and 18 research questions to explore the interplay between relational turbulence and communal coping in the relationship between surviving parents and emerging adult children after parental/partner death. Forty-five parent/emerging-adult child dyads completed a series of six weekly surveys, with scales measuring stress, mental health, relationship characteristics, relationship functioning, communicative interactions, communal coping, and relational turbulence, and open-ended questions soliciting narrative responses about their uncertainty, interdependence, and coping. The qualitative responses were analyzed with a thematic analysis, a phronetic iterative approach to qualitative data analysis, and a thematic co-occurrence analysis. Results revealed four sources of relational uncertainty, four themes of interdependence, and five themes associated with coping behaviors. Furthermore, results of a thematic co-occurrence analysis revealed nine patterns between and across experiences of relational uncertainty themes for parents and children, three patterns between and across interdependence themes for parents and children, ten patterns between and across communal coping themes for parents and children, and ten patterns across experiences of uncertainty, interdependence, and coping themes for parents and children. The quantitative survey responses were analyzed with hierarchical linear modeling to create multilevel models to assess hypotheses. In particular, actor effects, partner effects, and longitudinal effects were assessed with two-level models. Results provided mixed support for the proposed hypotheses and revealed the presence of some partner effects with regard to research questions. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of theoretical and practical limitations for the qualitative and quantitative results, implications of the qualitative and quantitative results when considered in tandem, and a discussion of strengths, limitations, and directions for future research.