Assumptions Driving Interpersonal Communication Research ...

Welcome to another post at the confluence of personal writing (this blog, obviously) and dissertation work. Today, in order to sort out some of my thoughts on the similarities between organizational communication and interpersonal communication, I will consider how we can conflate the two, allowing conclusions from organizational research to reach into interpersonal communication. Such bridging is useful because organizational communication research has lead the field of research on the effects of different communication channels, starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These types of questions were largely ignored in the realm of interpersonal communication until much more recently. As I have no interest in letting a wealth of past research go to waste, it is vital to find ways to bridge the two areas.

The challenge inherent in this bridging, however, is that organizational communication research is driven by one fundamental assumption: In business, individuals and organizations are driven by efficiency as a way to increase profits. This assumption is largely a normative one; that is, we can state it most accurately by noting that this drive should be present. Fair or not, this particular assumption is hugely useful because it removes a large source of variance in communication channel use before it can be considered. Instead, the research can focus on what best practices are and what happens when those best practices are followed or violated. Research demonstrating that best practices are not followed can be dismissed as simple error variance; the fact that companies don?t perform at maximum efficiency is an issue for other researchers, not for the study of communication.

This helpful assumption, however, is not so clearly present in interpersonal communication. Efficiency is not what drives interpersonal communication, and claims that it should be are difficult to support. Instead, relationship goals could be argued to drive interpersonal communication, but these goals are particularly complicated. Sometimes, our goals are to grow closer to someone. But other times, we wish to antagonize or ignore as a way to make the relationship more distant. This complexity results in a dizzying array of goals that we must consider to successfully understand the processes that drive communication channel selection.

One way that this issue is dealt with is to focus on ?relational maintenance behaviors,? things we do to keep up with the people who matter to us. This solves the problem of goals because it dismisses a whole host of relationships. By focusing only on those people who are meaningful to us, we can now make normative claims about relationships: people engaged in relational maintenance are driven to stay close and grow closer to others.

This seems like a much safer presumption, but here?s the problem: Though the claim may be true of almost everyone (most everyone has a desire to be close to people), the skills that surround this goal are much more varied, and the understanding of these processes is much more complex than the assumptions in organizational communication research. In other words, we all want to maintain our relationships but we often aren?t very good at it. This could be dismissed as error variance, except for the fact that our maintenance behaviors fluctuate widely between relationship types and even within types and within particular relationships themselves. We can go from keeping up close contact and deep friendship with a roommate to speaking to that person just once or twice a year within a matter of months.

If we see this pattern from the outside, we might conclude that the relationship had gone from seeking closeness to seeking distance. This conclusion is likely wrong; instead it is just the nature of relationships: Proximity matters. But how can we use this observation to understand relational maintenance behaviors? Is it fair to assume we are driven to be close to people, if the people we seek can be so hugely influenced by convenience?

This all suggests the need to disregard information about communication networks and instead focus on general tendencies of individuals; for example, we can ask individuals generally about their efforts to maintain relationships, rather than asking both them and their current friends to report on behaviors. Unfortunately, this type of research does not solve the problems I?ve outlined; it simply ignores them and settles for a much simpler research agenda. Simple isn?t necessarily bad and there may be significant differences between individuals (for example, individuals who report skillful use of communication channels report more close relationships or relationships of a higher quality than individuals with less skillful use), but it does present a problem in using conclusions from organizational research in the study of interpersonal communication. As for how I will deal with this issue? alas, this blog post was not able to solve the problem.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. The Challenge of Researcher-Centric Communication Channel Research
2. The Appeal of Mediated Communication
3. Classifying Communication Channels: The Active-Passive Continuum

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2012 at 11:32 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

peoples choice awards 2012 ford recalls robert kardashian chicago weather forecast narcolepsy narcolepsy weather st louis