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McBride, M. C., & Bergen, K. M. (2014).Voices of women in commuter marriages: A site of discursive struggle. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 1-19. doi:10.1177/0265407514522890

The goal of the present study was to examine the sites of discursive struggle in the talk of commuter wives and how the interpenetration of discourses construct meaning for those in the commuter marriage. Fifty individual interviews were analyzed using contrapuntal analysis to examine competing discourses. From our analysis, two sites of discursive struggle emerged from the talk of commuter wives about their marital relationships: (a) discursive struggles of integration and (b) discursive struggles of conventionality. The voices of these participants responded to and anticipated both distal (cultural) and proximal (relational) discourses along the utterance chain constructing meaning around what it meant to be in a commuter marriage. Additionally, these data provided theoretical expansion in highlighting the understudied aspects of the distal not-yet-spoken in meaning construction surrounding relationships.

Jenkins, M., & Dragojevic, M. (2011). Explaining the process of resistance to persuasion: A politeness theory-based approach. Communication Research, 40, 559-590. doi:10.1177/0093650211420136

Two experiments are conducted to test a politeness theory-derived process model of resistance to persuasion. Experiment 1 demonstrates that messages with more forceful language, compared to messages with less forceful language, produce an overall threat to face (i.e., negative and positive face). A second experiment was conducted to replicate the findings of Experiment 1 and to extend the process model by testing the hypothesis that controlling language produces a threat to face because of the meta-communicative content (i.e., unsubstantiated claim of relative power) implied by the language selected by the source. Overall, the data provide support for a politeness theory based understanding of resistance to persuasion.