The Rules-Based Process of Revealing/Concealing the Family Planning Decisions of Voluntarily Child-Free Couples: A Communication Privacy Management Perspective

This study explains how members of voluntarily child-free (VCF) couples make unsolicited disclosures to social network members about their family-planning decision. Thirty-two members of VCF couples were interviewed. Communication privacy management (Petronio, 2002 Petronio , S. ( 2002 ). Boundaries of privacy: Dialectics of disclosure . Albany : State University of New York Press . [Google Scholar]) was used as the theoretical framework to discern the salient characteristics that lead to such disclosures. Participants reported the following interrelated processes as comprising how they revealed/concealed their family-planning information: (a) the rules-driven structure of revealing the child-free decision to social network members, (b) confidant selection, and (c) the salient characteristics of concealing the decision from others. These findings contribute to a growing body of knowledge on family-planning communication and privacy management.