9.0 Introduction
9.0 Introduction
As discussed in Chapter 4,ever since human beings created language,people have had the opportunity to communicate with each other first by speaking and gesture,and later by writing and reading.No matter how people live in the world,they cannot live without communication.Communication plays an important role in people's daily lives.
As far as communication in marriage and family is concerned as we have seen,it is one of the primary activities marital partners engage in together (Thomas,1977).Communication and marriage are interrelated (Noller,1984).It can be seen as a standard for measuring marital satisfaction.Fitzpatrick (1988) argues that marital satisfaction affects communication,and communication in turn affects marital satisfaction.The more communication there is between spouses,the happier they may feel (Fitzpatrick,1988),as has been illustrated in my interview data.For example,the interviewees conceptualised that some domestic issues in relation to battery,emotional hurt,separation and divorce may occur between wives and husbands if there is a problem of communication between them.
From the literature on communication in Chapter 4,we can see that communication can be classified as either verbal or non-verbal behaviour (Noller,1984).Verbal behaviour includes talking,laughing,swearing,shouting,ridiculing,while non-verbal behaviour includes facial expression,gestures,non-communication,indifference,writing,etc.Cameron (1998) states that language,whether it is verbal or non-verbal communication,is not neutral because this is a vehicle carrying and shaping ideas of speakers to recipients and is the 'programmer' for mental activity (Whorf,1976).Good/poor verbal or non-verbal communication between people,here specifically within couples,will directly impact on them.For example,poor communication will influence the mental problems of speakers and recipients.Some wives complain that their husbands are silent (a form of non-verbal conversation) in the home,which may make them deeply disappointed (Li &Zhou,2002;Tannen,1990) and impacts on their emotions (Liu,2003;Zhou &Fu,2003).
According to both previous studies and my own,we can see that couples sometimes use communication inappropriately in the home although communication is an inevitable tool in their lives.For example,according to the survey by the China Law Society mentioned in Chapter 2,65 per cent of husbands did not communicate with their wives in the home (Cui,2002;Yang,2004).Because of this,psychological violence is an issue between wives and husbands.How did my respondents talk about communication and what types of communication did they use in the home?
In the interviews,interviewees were asked about the role of communication in marriage and family.In the questionnaires,respondents were asked about the frequency of communication with their partners.In both the interview and questionnaire data,the responses also showed what types of communication were likely to be used by couples in the home.When I coded my interview data,I found that my interviewees conceptualised communication similarly to other academics' perspectives.They also emphasised the importance of communication in their marital lives and the impact of communication on their spousal lives.When I coded my questionnaire data,I found that there was an issue of poor/unhealthy[1] communication between wives and husbands in the home.In both types of data,I specifically found that respondents used different forms of communication from their partners in the home.These different forms covered both verbal behaviour in relation to ridicule,shouting,dirty language,and non-verbal behaviour in relation to facial expression,including glare,body gestures,including fists and stamping foot,indifference,non-communication,silence.This chapter will mainly discuss two types of communication:non-communication and dirty language as forms of psychological violence according to the interviewees' conceptualisation.Other types of communication used by couples will be discussed in Chapter 10.