Communication Among Grandmothers, Mothers, and Adult Daughters: A Qualitative Study of Maternal Relationships

This scholarly volume examines communications processes within the grandmother-mother-daughter relationship, emphasizing an intergenerational perspective. Miller-Day uses the device of layering to integrate and juxtapose alternative experiences of the social world. This allows the reader to be situated in the world of grandmothers, mothers, adult daughters, and granddaughters as they experience, describe, and analyze their family communication. The book describes and interprets the patterns of communication among female family members that provide symbolic links across generations. Drawing on eight months of qualitative research, using observations of and extensive interviews with six sets of middle-income, Caucasian female family members, this book provides a heuristic account of intergenerational mother-daughter relational communication. This book builds upon and extends earlier qualitative research to include the experiences of multiple families, as well as maternal grandmothers. With the inclusion of aged mothers as well as younger mid-life mothers and their adult daughters, Miller-Day seeks to illuminate how this relationship is experienced at different points in a woman's life. In addition, in studying three generations of women, she gathers multigenerational perspectives on family, and then examines these for patterns of maternal interaction transmitted across generational boundaries. Scholars and researchers in the areas of family communication, intergenerational communication, women's studies, family studies, interpersonal communication, relationships, and others (social workers, psychologists, counselors) who need to understand family communication processes and their dynamicsacross generational lines will all benefit from the wealth of material included in this volume.