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The purpose of this study is to provide a nuanced understanding of Chinese family tourists’ value co-creation by examining three important aspects of family vacation: What do families do during vacation? How do they make meaning of what they do? Do travelers’ role identities within their families play a role in the value creation process?

Upon reviewing related theoretical work, the authors undertook a mixed-method study consisting of both survey data and in-depth interviews.

The analysis revealed three clusters of family interactional content, including We open and share our worlds, We build knowledge and skills and We co-create and co-evaluate, and five clusters of family travelers, including Outdoor enthusiasts, Socializers, Nature lovers, Culture admirers and Relaxation seekers. Family roles, life situations and destination environments also interfaced with family activity participation and family conversations. A family vacation value co-creation process framework with four propositions was, thus, proposed.

Further exploration and validation of the proposed framework and propositions which emerged from the findings of this study are needed. Impacts of various family types and relational dynamics also warrant future investigation.

The results of family interactional and relational well-being facilitated by family vacation are pertinent to academia, industry and public policy-making.

Family vacation can be a positive intervention for the creation of family value and a means of meaning-making. Programs that integrate multiple family roles and address family-level value propositions would be collectively enriching.

The current study initiated a pioneering investigation by providing a depiction of how family travelers experience and make sense of a shared tourism experience, along with their value perceptions in such a co-created consumptive scenario.

This paper is a conversation piece which highlights the ways in which succession planning in large company might be handled. The discussion focuses on Christopher Oughtred the former Chairman of William Jackson Food Group, one of the largest family businesses in the UK. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper presents a conversation with a panel of leading family business experts and a family business owner. The paper presents latest thoughts on family business research, insights into a real family business succession project and reflections from a former Chairman on the succession process.

Findings highlight possible stages and requirements of a successful transition and succession plan. Also suggestions for areas of further research are presented.

The conversation recorded in this paper represents a rare opportunity to obtain reflections and insights on a succession process and how it was managed in a large family business. The conversation also highlights the kinds of challenges often experienced by family businesses during transition and succession. As a case study this is an exemplar of how succession might be planned.

The researchers conducted a collective case study to investigate how families engaged in making activities related to aerospace engineering in six pop-up makerspace programs held in libraries and one museum. The purpose of this paper is to support families’ engagement in design tasks and engineering thinking, three types of discussion prompts were used during each workshop. The orienting design conjecture was that discussion prompts would allow parents to lead productive conversations to support engineering-making activities.

Within a collective case study approach, 20 consented families (22 adults, 25 children) engaged in making practices related to making a lunar rover with a scientific instrument panel. Data included cases of families’ talk and actions, as documented through video (22 h) and photographs of their engineering designs. An interpretivist, qualitative video-based analysis was conducted by creating individual narrative accounts of each family (including transcript excerpts and images).

Parents used the question prompts in ways that were integral to supporting youths’ participation in the engineering activities. Children often did not answer the astronomer’s questions directly; instead, the parents revoiced the prompts before the children’s engagement. Family prompts supported reflecting upon prior experiences, defining the design problem and maintaining the activity flow.

Designing discussion prompts, within a broader project-based learning pedagogy, supports family engagement in engineering design practices in out-of-school pop-up makerspace settings. The work suggests that parents play a crucial role in engineering workshops for youths aged 5 to 10 years old by revoicing prompts to keep families’ design work and sensemaking talk (connecting prior and new ideas) flowing throughout a makerspace workshop.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how family member employees’ communicative experiences within their families affect their perceptions of the workplace. The influence of family business employees’ perceptions of family communication patterns on family satisfaction, family involvement, and work involvement within their family businesses were explored.

A total of 138 family business employees, representing 81 family businesses, were surveyed. The questionnaire contained measures of family communication patterns, family involvement, work involvement, family satisfaction, as well as several demographic questions. Path modeling was used to analyze two proposed models of family involvement and work involvement.

Conversation orientation was related to perceptions of family satisfaction and perceptions of family satisfaction were related to perceptions of family involvement. While both proposed models were consistent with the data, no significant relationships were found between conformity orientation and perceptions of family satisfaction and between perceptions of family satisfaction and work involvement.

While not only exploring family business employees’ experiences through a unique communicative lens, this study also provides several practical implications for family business owners and managers.

As we opened this chapter in relation with Loyla's life, we did so with a transcript excerpt from a research conversation in which Loyla spoke about a series of experiences shaping much unhappiness in her life; they were experiences also creating significant concern for Orie. On the day in May when Loyla, Orie, and Janice engaged in the conversation from which the transcript excerpt is taken, Orie and Loyla had, just hours prior, participated in an after-school meeting with Mrs. Gallagher. Orie explained to Janice that she had requested the meeting as a result of a series of situations unfolding over a number of months between Loyla, Cicily, and Ahlam. Recounting the events to Janice, Orie began with Loyla's shift in inviting Ahlam to her birthday party. Initially, Loyla suggested Ahlam as a friend she wanted to invite but then, the next morning, she told Orie she no longer wanted to invite Ahlam because Cicily had said that if Ahlam was invited, she would not attend (Journal entry, Orie, December 8, 2008).

The purpose of this study was to explore how mothers with an ADHD child living in the household experience, perceive, and manage family communication.

A qualitative research design study was employed where in-depth interviews were conducted amongst nine married mothers who have an ADHD child.

Three themes emerged from the interview data: managing internal relations, managing stigma, and difficulties in managing the communication process. Mothers communicate with their ADHD child differently than their non-ADHD children, as conversations with the ADHD child are often unpredictable, negative, and erratic. They specifically experience these conversation patterns when giving directions, during times of discipline, and when the child acts impulsively or cannot focus.

Mothers are not always open about their child’s ADHD with nonfamily members as they are afraid of the stigma that is attached to the condition. Mothers recognize the difficulties in the communication process as they spend a considerable amount of time on their child’s ADHD issues, and their time given to others in the family may be compromised. They also recognize that because of the amount of stress and emotional burnout they feel from having an ADHD child, they need emotional and pragmatic support from family, friends, and professionals. The mothers who receive the least amount of emotional support from their spouses also feel the highest amounts of stress.

Communication plays an important role in health decisions and behaviors. Friends and family exert influence through communication and, when considering smoking, this is particularly salient among those friends and family who smoke. Guided by primary socialization theory and integrated behavioral model, the present study examined the effects of having smoking friends and family on smoking beliefs (e.g. negative consequences, positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement), cultural normative beliefs, pro-smoking injunctive norms, smoking intentions and recent smoking behaviors.

Cross-sectional online survey data were collected from college students (N = 227). Multivariate analysis of covariance and path analysis were performed.

College students who reported having smoking friends were more likely to report higher levels of positive reinforcement, cultural normative beliefs, pro-smoking injunctive norms, positive attitudes, smoking intentions and recent smoking behaviors than those without smoking friends. Frequent communication with smoking friends was significantly related to cultural normative beliefs, pro-smoking injunctive norms, positive attitudes and smoking intentions. The analysis, however, did not yield statistical support for the associations between frequent communication with smoking family and smoking perceptions, norms and behaviors.

The present study highlights the vital roles of friends' influence for college students' smoking behaviors. Communication-based intervention can help better equip college students with communication strategies that prevent tobacco use by promoting more effective conversations with friends.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how migration affects the care of older people in Italy.

The paper is based on anthropological fieldwork by one of the authors. This consisted of in-depth interviews with 20 “badanti” (migrant caregivers), with relatives of older people and with social workers in the city of Verona, Italy. It further included extensive study of secondary materials on the topic of migrant care of older people.

Badanti, Italian families and older people find themselves locked in an uneasy contract: badanti because they are exploited and often unable to find better, formal employment; Italian families because they are aware that they fail to render their moral duty to their aged parents and grandparents; and older people because they feel neglected and maltreated by their children. Yet the three parties also rely on each other to make the best of a precarious situation. The relationship between badanti and Italian elderly highlights the contradictions within Italian politics on care and migration. This case study shows how migrants help Italian families to hold on to the tradition of family care for ageing parents.

The small sample of badanti and families provides a detailed and profound insight of the complexity of elder care in Italy but does not allow generalisation for developments in the country as a whole.

Policy makers should take notice of the indispensability of informal migrant care in present day Italy.

The originality of the paper lies in the in-depth conversations with badanti and in the way in which elderly care is contextualised in the Italian tradition of care and present day politics.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate and discuss a number of child-centric research methods/stimuli involving young children (5-6 years old) in interviews without, and subsequently with their parents. Existing and new methods were selected and developed for a study which aimed at obtaining insights into parents’ and young children’s understandings of children’s influence and family interaction with regard to family food consumption practices.

A total of 35 children were interviewed using semi-structured interviews in five kindergartens. Subsequently, 13 families were interviewed in their homes. The latter interviews included the same children as were interviewed in the kindergarten. The methods discussed include drawings, a desert-island-choice task, a sentence completion task, photographs, vignettes and a video-clip.

When interviewing young children about family decision making influence, the use of engaging methods contributes to the quality of data achieved and to the participants’ enjoyment of their participation. Care should be taken not to overload children with exercises. Visual rather than verbal methods worked better for engaging the children in the research process; for parents all included methods worked well.

The current study shows that a method developed specifically for the study (desert-island-choice task) was apt at including all family members’ perspectives; future studies should develop methods that capture shared rather than individual experiences. The study was carried out in wealthy areas in Denmark. It would be highly relevant to broaden the sample to other socio-economic and cultural contexts.

The study is based on interviews with children usually deemed too young to interview. The contribution is novel methods that allow for studying the interaction between children and parents and that are not based on reading and writing skills to access the perspectives of 5-6-year old children. Precautions regarding using existing methods are offered.

The purpose of this paper is to explore board functions and their location in family firms.

Through structured induction in a four-case study of medium-sized Swedish family firms, the authors demonstrate that board functions can be located in other arenas than in the common board and suggest propositions that explain their distribution.

(1) The board is but one of several arenas where board functions are performed. (2) The functions performed by the board vary in type and emphasis. (3) The non-family directors in a family firm serve the owners, even sometimes governing them, in what the authors term “bidirectional governance”. (4) The kin strategy of the family influences their governance. (5) The utilization of a board for governance stems from the family (together with its constitution, kin strategy and governance strategy), the board composition and the business conditions of the firm.

Being a case study the findings are restricted to concepts and theoretical propositions. Using structured induction, the study is not solely inductive but still contains the subjectivity of induction.

Governance agents should have an instrumental view on the board, considering it one possible governance arena among others, thereby economizing on governance.

The institutional pressure toward active boards could paradoxically reduce the importance of the board in family firms.

The board of a family company differs in its emphasis of board functions and these functions are performed with varying emphases in different governance arenas. The authors propose the concept of kin strategy, which refers to the governance importance of the structure of the owner and observations on bi-directional governance, indicating that the board can govern the owners.