Explicating the holistic communication privacy management process: Examining how Christian parents of queer children manage the information around their children’s queer identity

In the United States, over one fifth of generation Z identifies as queer. Similarly, almost 70% of adults identify as Christian. The likelihood that Christian parents have a child who identifies as queer is becoming increasingly more common. This dissertation set out to understand how Christian parents manage the privacy around their child’s queer identity using communication privacy management theory (CPM). CPM argues that privacy management occurs through three subprocesses: (a) privacy rule foundations (i.e., how people decide whether or not to disclose), (b) privacy coordination (i.e., how individuals manage their privacy), and (c) privacy turbulence and recalibration (i.e., when privacy breaks down and how individuals reestablish control over the information). Aiming to identify how the three subprocesses occur in holistically patterned ways, I used thematic co-occurrence analysis (TCA) to analyze 30 interviews with Christian parents of queer children. Ultimately, the findings established four new concepts that extended CPM: (a) chance criteria (those that occur randomly in life and prompt disclosure), (b) fractional ownership (a fourth boundary ownership type in which parents recognize the information belongs primarily to their child; however, they argue they control a fraction of it), (c) the privacy rule of trust (using past behaviors of recipients to determine the individual is trustworthy), and (d) perceived turbulence (when parents perceive that recipients are sharing the information with others, however, they lack any knowledge of such transgressions). Additionally, TCA helped identify two holistic CPM patterns: (a) the identity facilitated privacy management pattern and (b) the support facilitated privacy management pattern. These findings both extended CPM and provided practical applications.