Family Storytelling

Stories and storytelling are one of the primary ways that families and family members make sense of both everyday and difficult events, create a sense of individual and group identity, remember, connect generations, and establish guidelines for family behavior. With so many important functions, storytelling is a significant but still understudied communicative process for the family. Family Storytelling focuses on the ways in which stories are told in and about family in order to provide insight into the processes, functions, and consequences of family storytelling. This collection of empirical articles illuminates various ways in which family storytelling affects and reflects the negotiation of individual and relational identity in the family, teaches important family lessons, and helps members make sense of and cope with difficulty. Each of these functions is explored through both scientific and interpretive investigations, thus showcasing the contributions that research on family storytelling from different paradigms make to our understanding of the family. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Family Communication.

Jody Koenig Kellas is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. Her research focuses on the ways in which people communicate to make sense of their relationships and how communication, such as storytelling and perspective-taking, affect and reflect individual and relational well-being.

1. Framing Family: An Introduction Jody Koenig Kellas Part I: Developing Identity in the Family 2. Exploring the Narrative Process: An Analysis of the Adoption Stories Mothers Tell Their Internationally Adopted Children Meredith Marko Harrigan 3. Using Relational Stories to Predict the Trajectory Toward Marital Dissolution: The Oral History Interview and Spousal Feelings of Flooding, Loneliness, and Depression Eve-Anne M. Doohan, Sybil Carrère and Matt L. Riggs Part II: Teaching Lessons in the Family 4. "Love Stories aren't Always like the Movies": The Relational Implications of Inheriting Parents' Courtship Stories Haley Kranstuber 5. The Storied Nature of Health Legacies in the Familial Experience of Type 2 Diabetes Margaret M. Manoogian, Lynn M. Harter and Sharon A. Denham Part III: Making Sense of Difficulty in the Family 6. Exploring Links Between Well-Being and Interactional Sense-Making in Married Couples' Jointly Told Stories of Stress Jody Koenig Kellas, April R. Trees, Paul Schrodt, Cassandra LeClair-Underberg and Erin Willer 7. Inheriting the Narratives of Dementia: A Collaborative Tale of a Daughter and Mother Melissa Wood Alemán and Katherine W. Helfrich