Instructor Resource
Duck, Communication in Everyday Life: The Basic Course Edition With Public Speaking, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
Lecture Notes
Chapter 7: Personal Relationships
Learning Objectives
1. Distinguish between personal relationships and social relationships.
2. Explain the benefits of relationships.
Annotated Chapter Outline
I. Introduction
A. Relationships are not just about emotions, but about knowing and understanding the
world.
B. This chapter will examine:
i. The value of relationships as ways of knowing the world.
ii. The development of personal relationships.
II. What Are Personal Relationships?
A. Types of relationships recognized and represented by different styles of
communication.
B. Social relationships: Relationships in which the specific people in a given role can
be changed and the relationship would still occur (e.g., customer–client relationships
III. Benefits of Personal Relationships
A. Relationships provide two particular areas of value.
Instructor Resource
Duck, Communication in Everyday Life: The Basic Course Edition With Public Speaking, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
B. Relationships and What You Know
i. Influencing What You Know
a. Influence the distribution of information.
ii. Evaluating What You Know
a. Relationships help to test people’s knowledge of the world.
C. Relationships and Support
i. Robert Weiss identified six specific areas where relationships provide us with
something special, needed, or valued.
ii. Provisions of relationships: The deep and important psychological and
supportive benefits that relationships provide.
iii. Belonging and a Sense of Reliable Alliance
a. Feeling connected with others.
b. Sense of stability.
iv. Emotional Integration and Stability
a. Express and evaluate emotions.
v. Opportunity to Talk About Oneself
a. Enjoyable activity.
vi. Opportunity to Help Others
a. Being there for others.
vii. Provision of Physical Support
Instructor Resource
Duck, Communication in Everyday Life: The Basic Course Edition With Public Speaking, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
viii. Reassurance of Worth and Value
a. Giving up one’s own time to physically support another.
IV. Initiating Relationships: Attraction and The Relationship Filtering Model
A. Examine how two strangers move on to develop a personal relationship.
B. Talking to Strangers
i. Personal relationships develop only once we start talking to strangers.
ii. Interactions between strangers focus on gathering and providing information on
C. Steps in the Relationship Filtering Model
i. Getting to know people helps better map their worlds of meaning and decide if
you want to continue building a personal relationship.
ii. Relationship filtering model: Demonstrates how sequences of cues are used to
determine which people are selected to develop close relationships.
v. Behavior/Nonverbal
a. Provides new clues to the way a person thinks.
b. In part, nonverbal cues help determine if a person has the same worldview as
yours.
vi. Roles
Instructor Resource
Duck, Communication in Everyday Life: The Basic Course Edition With Public Speaking, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
b. This mode of observation helps to strengthen, modify or correct your
understanding of another’s worldviews.
vii. Attitude/Personality
a. Exact information about someone’s personality based on self-disclosure.
V. Developing and Maintaining Relationships
A. Relationships are created and maintained through communication.
B. The type of communication decides the type of relationship.
C. Creating Relationships
i. The essential function of communication is to make relationships real.
D. Transforming Relationships
i. Relationships are developed and transformed through changes in content of talk
and styles of communication.
ii. Relationship transformations are generally driven towards more intimacy or less.
E. Maintaining Relationships
i. Keeping It Going
a. Part of relationship maintenance is keeping it going through communication.
ii. Desired Intimacy
Instructor Resource
Duck, Communication in Everyday Life: The Basic Course Edition With Public Speaking, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
iv. Relational Continuity Constructional Units (RCCUs)
a. Communication maintains and transforms relationships when people are apart.
b. Relational continuity constructional units (RCCUs): Ways of
c. RCCUs are divided into three types.
1. Prospective units: One of three types of Relational Continuity
Constructional Units that keep the memory of the relationship alive during
2. Introspective units: One of three types of Relational Continuity
Constructional Units that keep the memory of the relationship alive during
3. Retrospective units: One of three types of Relational Continuity
Constructional Units that keep the memory of the relationship alive during
F. Relational Dialectics
i. People experience competing needs in relationships.
ii. Relational dialectics: The study of contradictions in relationships, how they are
played out and how they are managed.
iii. Four guiding assumptions.
Duck, Communication in Everyday Life: The Basic Course Edition With Public Speaking, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
v. Change (relational dialectics): Movement in relationships that occurs partly
through dealing with relational contradictions; in relationships, change is the
vi. Praxis (relational dialectics): The notion that activities of the partners in a
vii. Totality (relational dialectics): The notion that relational contradictions do not
occur in isolation from one another and that the whole complexity of relationships
viii. Internal and External Dialectics
a. Internal dialectics: Those occurring within a relationship itself.
1. Connectedness–separateness dialectic: The need to be with a relational
partner and the need to be away from a relational partner.
2. Certainty–uncertainty dialectic: The need for predictability and routine
3. Openness–closedness dialectic: The need to talk with a relational partner
and the need to not talk with a relational partner.
b. External dialectics: Those involving a relational unit and other relational
units or people within their social networks.
1. Inclusion–seclusion dialectic: The need for people in a relationship to be
2. Conventionality–uniqueness dialectic: The need of people to feel as if
3. Revelation–concealment dialectic: The need to prevent others from
knowing of the existence of a relationship.
VI. Coming Apart
A. Symptoms and Sources of Decline
Instructor Resource
Duck, Communication in Everyday Life: The Basic Course Edition With Public Speaking, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
i. Julia Wood has offered six symptoms and sources of declines which does not
ii. Deterioration in Communication
a. Can be in the forms of reduction in the amount and quality of communication
as well as the onset of a negative tone of communication.
iii. Destructive Conflict
a. Overshadows positive relational elements.
b. Can be both a symptom and a source of relational decline.
iv. Changes in Evaluative Standards
c. Evaluations based on comparisons with alternatives.
v. Major Transgressions
a. Deal breakers in a relationship.
b. Subjective view of what a transgression is.
vi. Inequity
a. Determination of how much a person is investing in a relationship as
compared to what they are receiving.
b. People want equal and fair treatment.
vii. Personal Reflection
a. Time away from relational partners to evaluate the relationship.
b. Can be positive or negative.
B. Breakdown Process Model
i. Focuses on the uncertainties surrounding relationship breakdowns.
Instructor Resource
Duck, Communication in Everyday Life: The Basic Course Edition With Public Speaking, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
iv. Intrapsychic process: Part of the process of breakdown of a relationship where
an individual reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of a relationship and begins
v. Dyadic process: Part of the process of breakdown of relationships that involves a
confrontation with a partner and the open discussion of a problem with the
relationship.
a. Some people actively work on improving, or take a break from the relationship.
b. Some people don’t engage at all and end the relationship without discussion.
vi. Social process: Telling other people in one’s social network about dissatisfaction
and about possible disengagement or dissolution of a relationship.
a. A person seeks help either to keep the relationship together or support for his
b. Social network members may be common to both partners in a relationship.
vii. Grave dressing process: Part of the breakdown of relationships that consists of
creating the story of why a relationship died and erecting a metaphorical
tombstone that summarizes its main events and features from its birth to its death.
a. Essentially, a eulogy for the relationship.
viii. Resurrection process: Part of the breakdown of relationships that deals with
how people prepare themselves for new relationships after ending an old one.
a. This process has made the terms ‘rebound’ popularly understood in society.