| This qualitative study, with some quantitative measures, explores the relationship between parents' faith and their interaction in the family. With the investigator's experience that faith, especially religious faith, provides the ordering force in people's lives, and with a view toward future development of a model for family therapy and education, this study examines structure--specifically, individual parents' cognitive (faith) structure in relation to their family's communication structure. It accomplishes this, first, through an exploration in theory, and second, through empirical research with essentially blue-collar families.;Part II of the study involves empirical research: interviewing both parents in 30 families, using James Fowler's open-ended faith development interview, and observing and videotaping their families performing two decision-making tasks. Parents' faith structure was measured according to James Fowler's stages of faith development. Family communication structure (interaction) was measured according to seven five-point scales which the investigator developed on the basis of David Olson's (1979) Circumplex Model of Adaptability, with the social sciences supplying the concepts (pattern turn taking , systems feedback, assertiveness, rules, control, perspective taking, and negotiation). The scale for each concept showed rigidity and chaos at opposite extremes and adaptability at the center.;The main hypothesis was upheld: Rigidity in the parents' faith structure (Fowler stage 3, indicating firm orientation in the personal, with little abstract or systemic thinking, and a dependence on an external authority) seems to correlate with rigidity in the family communication structure (seen in rigid authoritarian rules, many implicit and few explicit rules, predictable repetitious and nonrandom patterns of communication).;Part I explores the theories of Jean Piaget, Gregory Bateson, Jurgen Habermas, Lawrence Kohlberg, and James Fowler. These theorists provided the tools that opened this research to the symbolic structure of religion as the meaning-making thread linking the parents' faithing structure to the family communication structure, and linking both of these to the broader concept of culture and cosmological thinking. Change, growth, and development would seem to be achieved through either the faith structure or the communication structure; when one changes, both change. |
