William K. Rawlins’s research while affiliated with Purdue University West Lafayette and other places

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Publications (12)


Managing Disputes in Young Adult Friendships: Modes of Convenience, Cooperation, and Commitment
  • Article

September 1992

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32 Reads

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10 Citations

Western Journal of Speech Communication

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William K. Rawlins

This paper investigates how young adult friends communicatively manage their interpersonal disputes. We examined the videotaped interaction of six pairs of disputing friends as well as each participant's subsequent, independently‐offered comments on the videotape of their discussion. We found that the friends in this study did not uniformly deal with their differences. Rather, three relationally constituted modes of dispute management, termed convenience, cooperation, and commitment, were identified. These modes were based on an interpretive analysis and comparison of the friendship pairs’ discursive practices and patterns of interpersonal perception.




A Dialectical Analysis of the Tensions, Functions, and Strategic Challenges of Communication in Young Adult Friendships

January 1989

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144 Reads

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67 Citations

Annals of the International Communication Association

This monograph synthesizes selected findings from an ongoing program of empirical and theoretical research regarding the nature and functions of communication in young adult friendships. It argues that friendship involves inherent dialectical tensions as a specific category of interpersonal relationship within American culture, in the actual communicative practices of friends, and within and across developmental periods of the life cycle. First are delineated four basic elements of the dialectical perspective employed to analyze the communication of friends: totality, contradiction, motion, and praxis. Next, an extensive examination of dialectical principles inherent in the communicative management of friendship occurs. The principles are then used to develop an intelligible frame for the practices and predicaments of managing young adult friendships communicatively with particular attention to gender, marriage, and work exigencies. Implications for the study of interpersonal communication in general and friendship in particular are discussed.


Adolescents' Interaction with Parents and Friends: Dialectics of Temporal Perspective and Evaluation
  • Article
  • Publisher preview available

February 1988

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21 Reads

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25 Citations

This research investigated the management of interaction with parents and friends as described by thirty-two high school juniors in open-ended interviews. An interpretive analysis of the respondents' remarks identified two dialectical principles informing their decisions to talk with parents and/or friends. The dialectic of historical perspective and contemporary experience regards opposing temporal orientations by parents and friends towards adolescent activities. The dialectic of judgement and acceptance involves polar evaluative tendencies demonstrated by parents and friends that were mediated by perceptions of caring. A qualitative ordering of hypotheses concerning the interplay of these principles is presented and implications are discussed.

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The communicative achievement of friendship during adolescence: Predicaments of trust and violation

December 1987

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22 Reads

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23 Citations

Western Journal of Speech Communication

This research investigated the varieties, tensions, and functions of friendship as described by 32 high school juniors in open‐ended interviews. Respondents reported considerable tension between popularity as public comportment and friendship as private communication. An overarching concern for these adolescents was the preservation or violation of trust in their friendships in the face of contrasting public and private exigencies. Trust mediated the accomplishment of friendship and allowed for their distinctions between types of friends. Two modes of violating trust, revealing a secret and backstabbing, are examined and illustrated, and implications are discussed.


Gregory Bateson and the Composition of Human Communication

January 1987

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39 Reads

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19 Citations

Research on Language and Social Interaction

Gregory Bateson's ideas have had widespread influence on contemporary social thought. As an anthropologist he has been recognized for articulating the equation of culture and communication (LaBarre, 1980), and for pioneering the use of photography in conducting anthropological research with Margaret Mead (Bateson & Mead, 1942). He directed the research project which produced the Double Bind theory of schizophrenia and had revolutionary impact on the theory and practice of psychotherapy (Sluzki & Ransom, 1976b, Berger, 1978). Moreover, thinkers as diverse as Laing (1971), May (1976), and Goffman (1974) credit him with conceptual foundations for their work.


Affective and instrumental dimensions of best, equal, and unequal friendships

June 1986

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23 Reads

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8 Citations

Central States Speech Journal

This research examines the extent to which subjects discriminate among their equal, unequal, and best friendships on the basis of values exchanged—stimulation, ego support, and utility—and perceived attraction of the other—physical, task, and intimate. Implications of these results for research on communication in friendship are discussed.


Openness as Problematic in Ongoing Friendships: Two Conversational Dilemmas

March 1983

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67 Reads

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140 Citations

This research investigated the management of interactions sustaining close friendships. Ten pairs of close friends were interviewed individually on two occasions and together on a third occasion. An interpretive analysis of subjects’ remarks identified a dialectical principle organizing the communicative practices of these relationships. The dialectic of expressiveness and protectiveness regards the decisions of self to reveal and conceal personal information. Because an individual must continually face the contradictory impulses to be open and expressive and be protective of self and/or of another, two generic conversational dilemmas result. These two empirically grounded dilemmas, termed tolerance of vulnerability and likelihood of candor, are discussed in this paper.


Negotiating close friendship: The dialectic of conjunctive freedoms

March 1983

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51 Reads

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88 Citations

Human Communication Research

An empirical study was conducted to investigate the practical management of interactions sustaining close friendships. Ten pairs of close friends were interviewed individually on two occasions and together on a third occasion. An interpretive analysis of subjects' remarks identified a dialectical principle governing the communicative organization of friendship. The dialectic of the freedom to be independent/freedom to be dependent conceptualizes the patterns of availability and copresence in a close friendship. Basically, while each person is free to pursue individual interests apart from the other and without the friend's interference or help, each retains the liberty to rely on the other should it be necessary. In granting each other a combination of these two freedoms, the individuals co-create a basis for patterns of interaction in their relationship that may curtail their individual liberties. The paper closes with an overview of the choices and possible corruptions experienced by self and other due to the mutually contingent nature of these contradictory freedoms.


Citations (11)


... The dialectical perspective on workplace riendships (Bridge & Baxter, 1992) provides a useul theoretical lens to understand the risks and side eects o workplace riendships as it highlights the specic tensions between the "employee" and "riend" roles at work. Bridge and Baxter (1992) apply dialectical perspectives on romantic and non-work riendship relationships (Baxter, 1988;Rawlins, 1989) to the work context, to speciy why blending the inormal riendship role with the ormal employee role leads to inter-role confict (Kahn et al., 1964;Katz and Kahn, 1978). Accordingly, role demands grounded in norms and expectations associated with the employee and the riend roles might be incompatible and even contradictory, thereby creating dialectical tensions (i.e., a contradiction o unctional opposites that negate each other; Bridge & Baxter, 1992). ...

Reference:

Managing the Risks and Side Effects of Workplace Friendships: The Moderating Role of Workplace Friendship Self-Efficacy
A Dialectical Analysis of the Tensions, Functions, and Strategic Challenges of Communication in Young Adult Friendships
  • Citing Article
  • January 1989

Annals of the International Communication Association

... The analysis also drew on Gregory Bateson's definition of meta-communication in human interaction and communication, as presented by William K. Rawlins (Rawlins, 1987). According to this context was understood as a set of meaningful actions, which provided a psychological frame for communication. ...

Gregory Bateson and the Composition of Human Communication
  • Citing Article
  • January 1987

Research on Language and Social Interaction

... William Rawlins (1983Rawlins ( , 1989Rawlins ( , 1992Rawlins ( , 1988 introduced the concept of dialectics in communication through studying friendships. He found friendships experience contextual and interactional tensions due to dialectics such as dependence/independence, private/public, ideal/real, and acceptance/judgment that are particularly challenging because they are not static, but rather constantly shifting, and interwoven in "ambiguous ways" (Rawlins, 1992). ...

Adolescents' Interaction with Parents and Friends: Dialectics of Temporal Perspective and Evaluation

... While directness and aggression appeared wrong and unhealthy, several studies indicated otherwise. Rawlins and Holl (1987) suggested that 'judgment' was a sign of affection in friendship. Aggression ironically encouraged heroes to reflect upon themselves (Egross. ...

The communicative achievement of friendship during adolescence: Predicaments of trust and violation
  • Citing Article
  • December 1987

Western Journal of Speech Communication

... In particular, the internet could serve as an integrated medium that facilitates long-distance communication through text, images, and audio [2], thereby to some extent changing social interaction patterns. Previous studies have demonstrated that online interactions, mainly within online communities [3], substantially enrich the social networks of individuals and enhance information exchange and cooperation [4]. These online communities often replicate physical social networks and are established around specific relationships, including kinship, friendship, professional ties, shared interests, leisure activities, neighborhood connections, and the protection of rights [5]. ...

Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space
  • Citing Article

... Given the definitions of public and personal issue arguments and evidence of face validity, topics taken from previous argument research (Canary et al., 1995;Canary, Weger, & Stafford, 1991;Legge & Rawlins, 1992;Levine & Boster, 1996) were designated by the author as either public or personal. Public issue argument topics included: abortion; death penalty; environment; drug legalization; underage alcohol drinking; racial prejudice; sex discrimination; sexual orientation discrimination; religion; gun control; drug testing; military spending; animal experimentation; surrogate mothering; foreign product restriction; sports; movies; etiquette=manners; race discrimination; and politics. ...

Managing Disputes in Young Adult Friendships: Modes of Convenience, Cooperation, and Commitment
  • Citing Article
  • September 1992

Western Journal of Speech Communication

... High-quality LMX relationships are characterized by mutual trust, support, liking, and loyalty (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995). These characteristics resemble those of friendship (Morrison & Cooper-Thomas, 2016), which reflects the affective dyadic bond (Hays, 1998) that belongs to the private sphere (Rawlins et al., 1986). However, how high-quality LMX may come to incorporate friendship and the consequences of such a shift remain unclear (Horan et al., 2021). ...

Affective and instrumental dimensions of best, equal, and unequal friendships
  • Citing Article
  • June 1986

Central States Speech Journal

... Using relational dialectics (Baxter, 2006;Baxter & Montgomery, 1996), the researchers focused on stepchildren's perceptions of communication and the metaphor of feeling caught in the middle in stepfamilies. Rawlins (1989) argued that dialectical tensions are often brought to light in the metaphors that people use to talk about their relationships. As such, the goal of the present study was to identify the discourses that children in stepfamilies perceive animate communication with their parents and between their parents. ...

Metaphorical Views of Interaction in Families of Origin and Future Families
  • Citing Article
  • March 1989

Journal of Applied Communication Research

... The onward transmission of negative content is moderated by the social connection held between transmitter and receiver and a key motivation for the transmitter will be presenting a positive self-image (Bordia & DiFonzo, 2005). Regarding emotional valence in transmission, early research on social transmission from this field demonstrated that people are less likely to transmit bad news, in case it generates negative effect in their conversational partner and creates a negative impression of the transmitter (Rawlins, 1983;Tesser & Rosen, 1975). More recently, Fay et al. (2021) found that negative content was only advantaged in onward transmission in an asocial condition and when the receiver was absent; when the receiver was present (analogous to dyadic conversation), there was no negativity bias in the choose-totransmit phase of transmission. ...

Openness as Problematic in Ongoing Friendships: Two Conversational Dilemmas
  • Citing Article
  • March 1983

... Detta slag av vänskap ställs inför speciella problem och utmaningar och ()'Meara identifierar fyra områden där parterna måste »förhandla» sig fram till en fungerande relation. De måste bestämnia sig för vilken sorts emotionellt band som finns mellan dem, om det är vänskap, platonsk kärlek, »vänskapskärlek», sexualitet eller romantisk kärlek(Rawlins 1982). ()'Meara menar att kvinna-man-vänskapen kan innefatta de första tre, men att parterna också måste ta ställning till sexualiteten som känsla. ...

Cross‐sex friendship and the communicative management of sex‐role expectations
  • Citing Article
  • September 1982

Communication Quarterly