MARITAL-THERAPY AND GENDER-LINKED FACTORS IN COMMUNICATION

Understanding the process of communication is important because commun ication is critical to all forms of psychotherapy. A proper understand ing of communication is particularly important in marital therapy beca use communication is often a treatment target. A central question of t his paper is whether or not communication training (CT) programs in ma rital therapy have been sufficiently sensitive to the complexities of gender in communication. A critical review of research on the role of gender in communication is presented. Existing data indicate that indi viduals tend to hold stereotypes of gender differences in language, bu t many of these purported differences have not been supported in empir ical investigations. However, gender has been found to be linked to va riables such as amount of conversation elicited, length of utterance, use of qualifying phrases, swearing, use of back channel cues, breakin g of silences, function of tag questions, and compliment style. Numero us limitations of the empirical literature exploring gender difference s in communication behavior are described. This paper advocates the de velopment of models of communication in which gender is recognized as having significant implications.