Conflict and Violence in the Family Context

As the above review showed, there are a number of consistent findings regarding family conflict and violence that identify conflict as a crucial communication process for families that has relatively predictable consequences for families as a whole and for individual members.

In particular, findings suggest that families benefit from what might be called constructive conflict communication and that destructive conflict communication can have very negative consequences, especially for children and weaker parents and when the conflict involves violence. As such, this research produced findings very similar to findings in other areas of research of conflict communication, suggesting that conflict communication in families is very similar to and, more important from a theoretical perspective, can be explained similarly to conflict communication in other social relationships. This view, however, strikes me as an oversimplification! There are some very important aspects of families that make family conflict communication unique and distinct from other forms of conflict communication. To describe these unique aspects of family conflict communication and also to suggest areas for future research is the purpose of the following section of this chapter.

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Source: Oetzel John, Ting-Toomey Stella. The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Communication: Integrating Theory, Research and Practice. SAGE Publications,2013. — 912 p.. 2013

Conflict and Violence in the Family Context

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