The Analysis Of Family Communication Patiern And Its Influence On The Family Conflict Styles From A Cross-Cultural Perspective

With the acceleration of globalization, cross-cultural communication has been involved in various fields. As the minimal units of the society, families are unavoidably included in such communication. Nowadays, more and more people get married with thosefrom different countries. Since these families consist of people from different cultural backgrounds, there are certainly cross-cultural conflicts between the family members. Furthermore, because people from different cultural backgrounds have different communicative behaviors and conflict styles, the contradiction between family members may grow in breadth and in depth. So it is meaningful to learn about the family communication pattern and conflict styles of Chinese and American cultures, especially for the transnational families or other families with their members from different cultural backgrounds.This paper adopts the context-analysis qualitative research method with four family movies as the research material from which research data and examples for analysis are drawn. They are two Chinese movies, In-laws and Feng Shui, and two American movies, Ordinary People and American Beauty. Through analyzing the related movie episodes and contexts in the four movies based on the grounded theories including Rahim’s conflict styles, Ritche and Fitzpatrick’s family communication pattern, Hofstede’s individualism-collectivism and power distance value dimensions and Hall’s high-low context theory, it draws the following findings. Firstly, the conformity orientation of family has direct relation with the conflict styles taken by the family members. Secondly, Chinese families are more conformity-oriented than American families. Thirdly, Chinese families tend to use avoiding and obliging styles while American families would use competingstyle when handling with family conflicts. The study also finds that family roles influence the conflict styles as well. The findings of this study not only provide the guidance for the daily communication of Chinese and American families, but also show a new perspective for further research in this field.