AMBIGUITY IN PARENTS DIVORCE-RELATED DISCLOSURES: EFFECTS OF SUPPORT EXPECTATIONS AND STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY ON PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING, RELATIONAL QUALITY, AND COMMUNICATION SATISFACTION

Recent scholarship has suggested that characteristics of parents disclosures may offer unique insight into explaining the effects of divorce disclosures. And, while Communication Privacy Management theory posits that the strategy used to reveal private information may influence how the dyad renegotiates their privacy rules and privacy boundaries during periods of change, attention has not been given to specific strategies. Thus, the goals of this dissertation were to develop a context specific, self-report measure of strategic ambiguity, to extend CPM by developing strategic ambiguity as an indirect disclosure strategy, and to shed light on how strategic ambiguity may affect the parent and emerging adult children when discussing divorce-related issues.Two studies were undertaken to achieve these three goals. The first study developed a measure of strategic ambiguity. Participants recalled a recent conversation with a parent about a problem at home and answered the 40 proposed items for the scale. Confirmatory factor analysis and reliability analysis were conducted to identify the best set of items to assess strategic ambiguity. The second study required parent-child dyads visit a communication lab to complete a series of questionnaires and discuss two divorce-related topics. Correlation, regression, and repeated measures analysis of variance analyses were conducted to test a series of hypotheses and a research question regarding the role of strategic ambiguity in parents divorce-related disclosures.Results for the two studies indicated that strategic ambiguity could be reliably and validly measured. Additionally, strategic ambiguity consistently predicted emerging adult childrens adjustment outcomes. Tolerance for ambiguity was found to moderate the effects of strategic ambiguity for parents relational quality and communication satisfaction. However for offspring, tolerance for ambiguity had direct, rather than moderation, effects on adjustment. Parents use and offsprings perceptions of strategic ambiguity did not differ from one another. Relational quality for parents and children was the most consistent postdivorce adjustment factor predicted by strategic ambiguity.The results of Studies 1 and 2 are discussed with respect to how they helped contribute to achieving the methodological, theoretical, and empirical goals of the dissertation. The construction and testing of the strategic ambiguity measure provides a methodological advancement over prior means of examining disclosure. The inclusion of strategic ambiguity offers a useful explanatory tool for examining the effects of private disclosures on relational quality. Finally, strategic ambiguity has been shown to help explain the some of the effects of parent-to-child disclosures, although it did not aid in explaining the discrepant past findings regarding psychological well-being. Limitations and future direction are also discussed.