Family Communication Patterns and Young Adult Relational Maintenance in Parent-Child Relationships in the Chinese American Family

This research paper aims to investigate the general family communication patterns and relational maintenance strategies in the Chinese American families. The paper is also concerned about the relationships between family communication patterns and relational maintenance strategies in the parent-child relationships. Fitzpatrick & Ritchie's revised family communication patterns instrument and Canary and Stafford's relational maintenance behaviors instrument were applied to recognize the participants' perspectives toward family communication. The second generation participants and the later generation participants were invited to participate in this research in order to expand the scope of intercultural and intergenerational study. The results indicated that there was no significant difference between conversation orientation and conformity orientation in the Chinese American families. Protective and pluralistic were two common family communication types in the Chinese American families. The study supported that Chinese American parents encourage their children to develop their own ideas, but they still tend to expect their children to follow parents' ideas for the final decisions. In addition, openness and positivity were two common relational maintenance strategies in the Chinese American families. The conversation orientation was discovered to be correlated to the relational maintenance strategies in parent-child relationship rather than conformity orientation. The results proved that if parents discuss a wide array of topics with their children in the families, they would be more likely to use relational maintenance strategies to maintain parent-child relationships.