Communication Change Throughout the Pandemic From Students’ Perspectives

Recent research in social science has focused on family interactions, but there is a gap concerning the impact of the pandemic on family communication. Addressing this gap could reveal how the pandemic has impacted family communication and interaction. The goal of this study was to identify communication patterns among high school students and their parents. The research question is: How has family communication changed throughout the pandemic for students in high school and their parents that worked at home during the height of the pandemic? The question was addressed by a study analyzing data from randomly distributed questionnaires with a paired sample t-test to determine whether the difference in communication dimensions from the RFCP (conversation-orientation and conformity-orientation) from the height of the pandemic to the time of this study was significant. This study concluded that there was a statistically significant decrease in conformity-orientation from the height of the pandemic to the time of the study. However, this study is representative of only the high school that was studied, relied largely on participants’ self-report of memories of the pandemic, and could have been heavily influenced by current events an individual was experiencing. Parent data is also only descriptive. This study did reveal that high school students’ conformity-orientation has decreased throughout the pandemic for students in high school, and has revealed that as COVID-19 restrictions eased after the height of the pandemic, family values of sharing ideas, beliefs, and values decreased.