Download On Iowa, Relationships, and Communication: A History of the Field

Volume 46, Number 1, Fall 2014, pp. 5- 15
Duck 5
On Iowa, Relationships, and Communication: A History of
the Field of Personal Relationships
Steve Duck
T
he year is 1973, over forty years ago. [Deep voice
intoning] Nobody has ever heard of “relational
communication.” There is no field of “relationship research.” In fact
there are only two books with the words “personal relationships”
together in the title in the whole of the social sciences. Some scholars
research marriage and family, mostly from a department of
Sociology or perhaps Home Economics. Some psychologists have
studied attraction and run into storms of criticism about the use of a
laboratory method to do so (Byrne, 1971). Not one single article with
personal relationships in the title has ever been published in a
Communication-based journal . . . .
What?? This cannot be! He is crazy and demented! Look
around! Relationship research is everywhere. There are even whole
departments which offer degrees in relationship study. There are two
flourishing journals reporting the study of personal relationships.
Interpersonal communication and relational communication are the
centerpieces of some basic courses. There are multiple divisions in
the National Communication Association dedicated to relational
study in its various forms. And so on.
That was then; this is now. What happened in between?
And, what does the progress from one state-of-the-art to another tell
us about the future of our discipline and more importantly about the
role of the state of Iowa in developing it?
History is like Truth; somewhat elusive, open to different
interpretations, shifting with the perspective of the observer, and
often disputed. For some, history shows the progressive development
of a given issue (“Democracy,” “Monarchy,” “Social Science”)
towards an ideal state, usually remarkably consonant with the
present. From such a teleological viewpoint, whatever happened was
destined to do so and was the inevitable progress of inherent higher
order imperatives to bring about the best arrangement of activity,
namely whatever we have today.
From other slightly different but consistent perspectives, the
influence of individual acts and persons creates a state that would not
otherwise exist. Without John Adams, George Washington, and King
Steve Duck (Ph.D., University of Sheffield, UK) is Daniel and Amy Starch
Distinguished Research Chair, CLAS Dean’s Administrative Fellow, and
Chair of the Department of Rhetoric at the University of Iowa.
Correspondence should be sent to [email protected].
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Iowa Journal of Communication
George III’s foolish ministers, the independence of the United States
of America would have emerged in an entirely different way; without
Augustus Caesar there would have been no Roman Empire, no
standardization of Roman law across half the world, and Christianity
might not have become one of the major forces in world social
evolution.
Yet a third, and entirely opposed, viewpoint is that
contingency has more influence than is normally credited. If Marshall
Blucher had not pressed on doggedly to arrive exactly when he did,
then Napoleon would have won the Battle of Waterloo, “the nearest
run thing you ever saw in your life” would have been a loss for the
Duke of Wellington, and Europe would be a French-speaking place.
Or, better weather in 1941 would have resulted in the fall of Russia
and the subsequent German domination of the East.
Who can say with certainty what sorts of influence collided
to bring about the rise of the study of relationships and its impact on
a variety of scholarly enterprises that now tend to dominate the
research agenda? Such factors as individual participants engaged in
relational research, organizations, specific research topics, social
transformations,
disciplinary
transformations,
institutional
transformations, and specific academic pieces could all be used to
trace the development of relationship research. Of course, each
perspective would very well convey an often-markedly distinct
historical view.
This, then, is a history rather than the history. It is a
narrative of events as I observed them from the perspective of
someone involved with the field of relationships since its beginnings
some four decades ago. Having had the opportunity to be connected
with two of the disciplines from which relational scholars emerged,
to found the International Network on Personal Relationships, and to
found and then edit the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships
for the first seventeen years of its existence, I have been provided
with a fortunate and unique perspective to witness the development
of the field. This is also a narrative of events placing the state of Iowa
and the discipline of communication as influences on the final
outcome, or specifically where the study of relationships stands at the
present time and where it might be heading.
In what follows, I will discuss some factors relevant to the
emergence of the field of relationships. I will then examine the
influence that communication scholars within the state of Iowa have
had on this development. Finally, I will conclude with what the
future holds for the study of relationships.
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Some Factors in the Emergence of the
Personal Relationships Field
As a groundbreaking step for the field of personal
relationships, Berscheid and Walster [later Hatfield] published the
first pioneering text on “interpersonal attraction” in 1969 (Berscheid
& Walster), and followed it up again in 1978 (Berscheid & Hatfield)
with a second edition. By the end of the 1970s, “attraction” was
being recognized in the discipline of social psychology as a budding
opportunity for young and inventive scholars. The fact that attraction
was identified in these works as a cognitive structure, more
particularly an attitude, was both an advantage and problem. The
advantage was that attitudes can be measured using transportable
scales, which can be used in many different environments. The
disadvantage was that the emphasis on cognition tended to understate
the role of both emotion and communication in the process of
revealing, in everyday life communication, the factors which are
important in making one person attractive to another.
Additionally, a creative, if somewhat controversial
paradigm, had been initiated and vigorously pursued by psychologist
Donn Byrne (1971) in his text, The Attraction Paradigm. The
method, using nonexistent (“bogus”) strangers who had allegedly
completed attitude scales with a known degree of similarity to one
filled out by a naïve subject, had become popular mostly as a
paradigm to be attacked for its artificiality and deception. All the
same, the paradigm provided an opportunity for those who had
always been uncertain how one could measure the causal direction of
the known correlation between similarity and attraction, since it
explicitly provided a method of manipulating similarity in order to
discover the effects of this independent variable on the dependent
variable of attraction.
Although many people in a variety of different academic
communities noticed these influential books, there was as yet no
energetic move towards the establishment of a group of scholars who
identified themselves as having this focused topic on their agenda.
Social psychologists who studied attraction, for instance, were
generally regarded as part of the group who studied attitudes and
were not in themselves different or special. What was needed was
some recognition of the fact that other scholars than simply the
attitude measurers were interested in attraction. Although this was a
step which had some problems, the development of the field can be
located in this next move.
In 1977, the first international conference devoted to the
development of relationships was organized in Swansea, Wales by
social psychologist Mark Cook and psychotherapist Glenn Wilson.
For the first time, it brought together people with different starting
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Iowa Journal of Communication
points for their interest in relationship research, although most of
those who attended the convention were psychologists of one stripe
or another. Unfortunately, overshadowing the event was the desire of
a political action group (the Pedophile Information Exchange—PIE)
with an agenda to normalize relationships of pedophilia. As part of
their campaign to take over the conference, they organized a number
of news conferences. Since the opportunity to report on a bunch of
academics talking about probability coefficients and attraction-asattitude scales was less appealing to the media than tawdry accounts
of the activities of this aggressive group, the conference resulted in
something of a disappointment. So, as in so much work about the
nature of relationships themselves, the field of study of interpersonal
attraction ran into significant difficulties of an interpersonal kind in
the earliest years. However, as a result of the convention’s internal
dynamics, a number of profitable academic hybrids were planted and
later bore fruit. One such idea was the notion that a convention
devoted to the study of personal relationships was not entirely overimaginative, as long as one took the convention away from a context
of political rancor.
Society was also undergoing some major changes
concerning the role of women and the nature and basis of
relationships. As one of the first communication scholars to enter the
arena reported (Kidd, 1975), the suggestions that were being given by
advice columns in popular media were changing from expert truth to
let it all hang out and do it yourself advice. For the first time,
individuals were being encouraged to disclose their inner thoughts
and emotions to one another as a means of strengthening their
relationships. Previously they had been counseled that, especially in
marriage, the husband should receive “due deference” from his wife
and were being told that all experts agreed on the solutions to
relationship issues (!). With the advent of more personalized advice,
and an emphasis on interpersonal disclosure, honesty, and mutual
respect, the nature of relationships was changing around us, and the
various precepts about relationships were beginning to focus on
interpersonal communication.
In 1982, the first International Conference on Personal
Relationships was organized in Madison, Wisconsin, with the explicit
intention of bringing together scholars and practitioners from many
different backgrounds to meet together and discuss common
threads—and differences—in the assumptions and practices of their
work. Although something close to just 100 people showed up at this
event, it was a landmark in the development of the field of relational
study, and the conference has repeated itself every two years—and
occasionally more often than this—ever since. The first conference
was cobbled together from my personal address lists, reprint requests,
relentless scouring of libraries for authors’ addresses, and an
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occasional cold transatlantic phone call from an unknown
Englishman to “famous people” in the USA. This was before the
Internet, of course, and the address list and correspondence were all
handled on the University of Lancaster’s first desktop computer
using [drum roll] all 512K of memory and a bag full of 5.25” floppy
disks.
As a result of this initial and unlikely conference, and the
second of its kind in 1984 in the same place, many scholars began to
exchange ideas and assumptions about the proper ways to study and
explore relational characteristics and to move away from the focused
attention on initial attraction. The emphasis fell at least as much on
other features of relational conduct and maintenance (or on issues
concerning the breakdown of relationships) as it did on the start of
attraction.
In parallel with these conferences, a series of books on
personal relationships was created by Academic Press (Duck &
Gilmour, 1981a,b,c; Duck 1982a, 1984). Also, the first Journal of
Social and Personal Relationships (JSPR) was published by Sage
Publications Limited in London. Now in its 30 th year of publication,
this journal has maintained prominence in citation ratings in a
multiplicity of disciplines and was followed 10 years later by a sister
publication (Personal Relationships). Unlikely as it seems, given
later successes, four publishers rejected the proposal for JSPR before
SAGE (Ltd) took it on, due to the personal intervention of the
owners, Sarah and George McCune [SArah and GEorge, geddit?].
The political masterstroke of these foundational activities
was the emphasis on the work of younger scholars. Not only were
graduate students and assistant professors encouraged to submit work
to JSPR rather than only to journals in their own disciplines, but they
were also encouraged to associate with one another through
numerous activities created as a distinguishing mark in these early
and subsequent conferences. As much as these conferences focused
on the usual presentation of academic work, they also focused on the
creation of informal connections and social networks between
scholars in the emerging cohort across disciplinary boundaries, the
introduction of graduate students to famous people, an informal
atmosphere and dress code, and large font, bolded first names on
badges without titles (so that people had to ask whether they had
been created equal as graduate students or new assistant professors—
or were merely well known).
As these people began to move through the ranks from
assistant to associate and full professors in their institutions, these
professional networks were maintained. This created a strong group
of people in many different institutions who were familiar with one
another’s work, cross-referenced it, and met periodically at the
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Iowa Journal of Communication
conferences to reestablish and reaffirm their connections. As these
people moved into positions of authority in their institutions, so it
became recognized by their activities that interdisciplinary work
could become reality and that recognition of the work of other
disciplines in this same field was a mark of good scholarship not of
diluted effort. At the same time, it was recognized that a new field
was beginning to evolve and already had an established structure of
authorities across different disciplines.
Theoretical and methodological evolution rapidly
accelerated along with this practical growth in opportunity. Not only
were collections of work across the disciplines being published, but it
became appropriate soon afterwards for the first two Handbooks of
Personal Relationships to be published as collections (Duck, Dindia,
Ickes, Milardo, Mills, & Sarason, 1997; Duck, Hay, Hobfoll, Ickes,
& Montgomery, 1988), which identified the common ground as well
as the distinctions between work done in major divisions of the field.
The emphasis on interdisciplinary citation was a profound advantage
of the early days of development in this particular field.
Iowa and the Field of Personal Relationships
From such developments along with ensuing and developing
research and teaching, the growth of interest in interpersonal
communication in the course of relational activity was able to ride a
growing wave of emphasis on the significance of communication in
life as a whole. What may be surprising to some people
geographically-removed from the region is that much of these
developments and other contributions in the field of personal
relationships occurred in the great state of Iowa.
The emphasis on interpersonal communication in relational
activity was largely developed at the initiative of Gerald Miller, a
distinguished professor who had graduated from the University of
Iowa and was to lead a prodigious research program at Michigan
State University. He was a moving force behind the creation of an
Interpersonal Communication Division in the [then] Speech
Communication Association and also in the International
Communication Association. Additionally, he was first editor, in
1974, of the new journal Human Communication Research, which he
developed into what is now a top flight national journal with a
preference for social scientific research into interpersonal
communication.
Further, many of the aforementioned activities were
transferred to Iowa. Then, in 1987, the Iowa Network on Personal
Relationships (INPR) was launched and it began holding annual
conferences: large conferences in the odd years and graduate
workshops in the even years. These conferences, held in Iowa City,
promoted the interests of junior faculty and graduate students and
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encouraged them to present their work in a convivial, collegial
atmosphere of professional acceptance where one or two “famous
names” acted as panel moderators and discussants, but were also
required to meet the junior folks in social settings as part of their
contracts. Before very long, the Iowa Network had attracted the
interest of graduate students and others from outside the Great State.
The Iowa Network was subsequently transformed into the
International Network on Personal Relationships, just in time for the
receipt of a consignment of coffee mugs with the correct translation
of the acronym INPR emblazoned on their side. [I still have a few
left, if anyone wants a piece of history.]
The net effect of INPR was the creation of a sustained
presence of both Iowa and communication in the development of the
new focus on the field of relationships as it began to burgeon and
grow. Into the state to join others already there, such as Mark
Redmond, came Anita Vangelisti, for a very short period, Melissa
Beall, Leslie Baxter, and other luminaries, an influx that has ensured
strength in relational communication at all three state Universities
and other institutions throughout Iowa. Such strength has continued
right up to the present day with the recent hiring of Rachel McLaren,
Kelly Ryan Steuber, Andy High, and Tammy and Walid Afifi. Over
the past few years, several contributors to the relational field have
earned their PhDs at the University of Iowa, including Tom Socha,
David McMahan, Larry Erbert, John Nicholson, Erin SahlsteinParcell, Kris Pond-Burtis, Masahiro Masuda, Marcia Dixson,
Maureen Keeley, Stephanie Rollie-Rodriguez, and Kristen Norwood.
The Iowa Communication Association’s top undergraduate student
award for 2013 was granted to Audrey Scranton, now a University of
Iowa graduate student, for an article on interpersonal management of
multiracial stigma.
Connecting Teaching and Research in Relationships
Iowa’s influence on the fields of interpersonal
communication and personal relationships—and vice versa—has
been both direct and indirect, not only in research but also in
teaching. A comprehensive listing and overview of research
emerging from the state of Iowa would be beyond the scope of this
piece and take too many pages. Among this work, however, would be
the scholarship of Leslie Baxter (e.g., 2011) and that of Melissa Beall
(e.g., 2010), which have directly affected researchers’ attention
toward such issues as dialectics and listening in personal
relationships, respectively. Gerald Miller’s team strengthened the
contribution of the study of interpersonal relationships to persuasive
strategies in relationship development and decline (e.g., Miller &
Parks, 1982). And, a model of breakdown of relationships that
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appears in most interpersonal textbooks developed and has been
extended in Iowa (Duck, 1982b; Rollie & Duck, 2006).
The connection between research and teaching has always
been a particular strength of the state’s commitment to education and
has been equally well-justified by the contribution of teaching to
scholarship as the reverse. In accordance with one of the public
justifications for supporting research—that the results of scholarly
activity feed into teaching in a way that gives local students an
edge—key teaching texts produced by scholars in Iowa include
Communication in Everyday Life (Duck & McMahan, 2009-2015);
Communication: Making Connections (Seiler & Beall, 1992-2011;
Seiler, Beall, & Mazer, 2014) and Interpersonal Communication:
Relating to Others (Beebe, Beebe, & Redmond, 1997-2014).
However, there is a subtler influence of the state of Iowa on
trends devoted to the study and teaching of personal relationships,
and these emerged from trends derived initially from the teaching of
effective speaking. Sam Becker, John Waite Bowers, Dennis Gouran,
Bruce Gronbeck, Donovan Ochs, and Doug Trank (all of whom
taught or studied in the state of Iowa and all of whom served as
president of the Iowa Communication Association, Central States
Communication Association, or National Communication
Association, or more than one of these associations) all brought the
influence of rhetoric and speech to bear on the field of personal
relationships. Particularly important was the fact that these
discussions resulted in collaborations between scholars who were
focused on psychological approaches and those who emphasized
rhetoric and speech, especially in everyday life (Dixson & Duck,
1993; Duck & Pond, 1989). An emphasis on Burke’s pentad in
relation to everyday talk between friends and acquaintances alerted
interpersonal researchers to the role of the mundane framing of talk
in the growth, maintenance, and decline of relationships (Dainton,
2000) as well as to the investigation of relationship rhetorics and the
implicit power of relational norms in persuasion (Fitch, 1998). Most
explicitly connected with the above research has been the relational
approach to communication studies (Duck & McMahan, 2015). In
this emerging approach, the interpretation of all communication
phenomena is laid at the door of basic relational factors embedded in
everyday talk. Great importance is given to everyday transmission
and construction of world-views, and the rhetorical impact of claims
made either face-to-face or through technology.
Conclusion
A part of life for all who teach communication, in the state
of Iowa and beyond, is that we live our lives among the topics that
we study, and while that makes us similar to medical researchers, it is
not a similarity that has always made us feel as valued as they are.
Volume 46, Number 1, Fall 2014, pp. 5- 15
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Although the commonplace nature of our topic has been
underappreciated until recently, its everyday importance as a key
element of transactive life is now beginning to attract attention and
recognition (Wood, 2006). The integration of interpersonal
communication, everyday speaking, and the relational basis for
communication—when examining the major moments in
relationships or the mundane exchanges of trivial topics that secretly
maintain relationships—represents an important accomplishment in
the social sciences. The very fact that so much of our teaching as
well as our scholarship is focused on the greater understanding of
interpersonal relationships is now a respectable point of view. If we
help our students to understand not only the significance of these
relationships but also a little more about their basis and functioning,
then we are contributing more to society than we did previously. Not
only that, but we are poised to make ever greater contributions to a
wider range of connected issues that are of profound social
importance.
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