Social Relationships

Relevance for Communication

Communication between humans has been defined in numerous ways, including information exchange, persuasion and influence, creation of meaning, building and maintaining relationships with other people, and structuration of social organizations, to name a few. These definitions of communication are not mutually exclusive of one another, and none of them has been widely accepted as the only correct or even best definition. Rather, they all emphasize different aspects of the multifaceted process that is human communication and their utility ultimately depends on the extent to which they allow scholars to gain insight into the communication processes or outcomes that they are interested in and theorize about. Despite the differences in where they place their emphasis, however, virtually all definitions agree that human communication is a symbolic process and, as a consequence, the meaning of communication is never exclusively fixed in the messages. Consisting of symbols that by definition are arbitrary and connected only tenuously to their referents, messages always require interpretation, which is dependent on the context in which a message is produced. As communication always takes place in a particular relational context, that relational context plays a crucial role in how messages are interpreted and meaning is assigned. Specifically, messages are always interpreted in light of the social relationships that exist between interlocutors, or message sources and receivers.

Relevance for Communication Research

The dependence of messages on relationship context ultimately means for researchers that they cannot understand specific messages—or, more generally, communication—if they do not account for the social relationships that exist between communicators. Consequently, researchers must be aware of the relational context in which messages are exchanged and the effect that the relational context has on message intent and interpretation. Furthermore, researchers need to employ this knowledge in research design and data analysis in order to either test these effects when they are of theoretical concern or to control for these effects if they are not of theoretical concern. Controlling for the effects of relational context is particularly important because frequently the effects of relational context are not only direct effects on the dependent variable, but interaction [Page 1646]effects; that is, relational contexts moderate the effects the variables of theoretical interest, such as message features or communicator characteristics, have on the dependent variables. Interactions are notoriously hard to discover and interpret, especially if they are unexpected, because they can affect both the strength and direction of an association, resulting in amplification or suppression of a main effect.

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