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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]. 6 Duck 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. Volume 46, Number 1, Fall 2014, pp. 5- 15 Duck 7 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 8 Duck 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 Volume 46, Number 1, Fall 2014, pp. 5- 15 Duck 9 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 10 Duck 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 Volume 46, Number 1, Fall 2014, pp. 5- 15 Duck 11 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 12 Duck Iowa Journal of Communication 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 Duck 13 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. References Baxter, L. A. (2011). Voicing relationships: A dialogic approach. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Beall, M. L. (2010). Perspectives on intercultural listening. In A. D. Wolvin (Ed.), Listening and human communication in the 21st Century (pp. 225-238). Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell. Beebe, S. A., Beebe, S. J., & Redmond, M. V. (2014). Interpersonal communication: Relating to others (7th edition). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Berscheid, E., & Walster, E. (1969). Interpersonal attraction. Reading, MA: Addison-Welsey. Berscheid, E., & Hatfield, E. (1978). Interpersonal attraction (2nd edition). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Byrne, D. (1971). The attraction paradigm. New York: Academic Press. Dainton, M. (2000). Maintenance behaviors, expectations for maintenance, and satisfaction: Linking comparison levels to relational maintenance strategies. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 17, 827-842. Dixson, M. D., & Duck, S. W. (1993). Understanding relationship processes: Uncovering the human search for meaning. In S. W. Duck (Ed.), Individuals in relationships [Understanding relationship processes 1] (pp. 175-206). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Duck, S. W. (Ed.). (1982a). Personal Relationships 4: Dissolving 14 Duck Iowa Journal of Communication personal relationships. London & New York: Academic Press. Duck, S. W. (1982b). A topography of relationship disengagement and dissolution. In S. W. Duck (Ed.), Personal relationships 4: Dissolving personal relationships (pp. 1-30). London & New York: Academic Press. Duck, S. W. (Ed.). (1984). Personal relationships 5: Repairing personal relationships. London: Academic Press. Duck, S. W., & Gilmour, R. (Eds.). (1981a). Personal relationships 1: Studying personal relationships. London & New York: Academic Press. Duck, S. W., & Gilmour, R. (Eds.). (1981b). Personal relationships 2: Developing personal relationships. London & New York: Academic Press. Duck, S. W., & Gilmour, R. (Eds.). (1981c). Personal Relationships 3: Personal relationships in disorder. London & New York: Academic Press. Duck, S. W., Dindia, K., Ickes, W., Milardo, R. M., Mills, R., & Sarason, B. (Eds.). (1997). Handbook of personal relationships (2nd edition). Chichester, UK: Wiley. Duck, S. W., Hay, D. F., Hobfoll, S. E., Ickes, W., & Montgomery, B. (Eds.). (1988). Handbook of personal relationships. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Duck, S. W., & McMahan, D. T. (2015). Communication in everyday life (2nd edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Duck, S. W., & Pond, K. (1989). Friends, Romans, Countrymen; lend me your retrospective data: Rhetoric and reality in personal relationships. In C. Hendrick (Ed.), Close relationships: Review of personality and social psychology (Volume 10) (pp. 17-38). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Fitch, K. L. (1998). Speaking relationally: Culture, communication, and interpersonal connection. New York: Guilford. Kidd, V. (1975). Happily ever after and other relationship styles: Advice on interpersonal relations in popular magazines, 1951–1973. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 61, 31-39. Miller, G. R., & Parks, M. R. (1982). Communication in dissolving relationships. In S. W. Duck (Ed.), Personal Relationships 4: Dissolving personal relationships. (pp. 127-154). London: Academic Press. Rollie, S. S., & Duck, S. W. (2006). Stage theories of marital breakdown. In J. H. Harvey and M. A. Fine (Eds.), Handbook of divorce and dissolution of romantic relationships (pp. 176-193). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Seiler, W. J., Beall, M. L., & Mazer, J. (2014) Communication: Volume 46, Number 1, Fall 2014, pp. 5- 15 Duck 15 Making connections (9th edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Wood, J. T. (2006). Chopping the carrots: Creating intimacy moment by moment. In J. T. Wood and S. W. Duck (Eds.), Composing relationships: Communication in everyday life (pp. 24-35). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.