Perceptions of communicative control strategies in mother-daughter dyads across the life span

Young, middle-aged, and older adult participants evaluated conversation scenarios that presented a middle-aged woman confronting either her young adult daughter or her older adult mother about a problem behavior. In all scenarios, the competence of the younger or older adult was salient, and the middle-aged woman used 1 of 3 control strategies: indirect, direct, or no control. As predicted, participants evaluated the direct control strategy more negatively than the other 2 strategies, and rated the indirect control strategy as more nurturing than the other 2 strategies. In addition, participants who were considering mothers in their 70s viewed the direct control strategy as more appropriate and the no control strategy as less appropriate than did those considering daughters in their 20s. Contrary to expectations, however, participant and target age did not interact to affect perceptions of the strategies, nor did a clear preference for the no control strategy over indirect control emerge. Results are interpreted within the framework of politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987), notions of autonomy and paternalism (Cicirelli, 1992), and the communication predicament of aging model (Ryan, Giles, Bartolucci, & Henwood, 1986).