Jody Koenig Kellas, Ph.D.
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Interactional Storytelling

Research that examines the process of storytelling and connections to health

What is Interactional Storytelling?

I have long argued that more research should focus on the process of storytelling - or the communicative manifestation of narratives. Interactional storytelling refers to the communicative processes that animate the sense-making of participants in joint storytelling episodes. My colleague, April Trees, and I set out to understand the processes relevant to making sense of family difficulty during joint storytelling episodes and identified four sets of behaviors. These Interactional Sense-Making (ISM) behaviors include engagement (warmth and involvement), perspective-taking (attentiveness and confirmation), turn-taking (dynamism and distribution), and coherence (organization and integration) (see Koenig Kellas & Trees, 2005). ISM behaviors - or the ways in which families or couples jointly communicate to tell a shared story - have been linked to family satisfaction, functioning and perceptions of supportiveness (Koenig Kellas, 2005; Trees& Koenig Kellas, 2009) and decreases in perceived stress for husbands whose wives engaged in higher levels of communicated perspective taking (Koenig Kellas, Trees, Schrodt, LeClair-Underberg, & Willer, 2010). In short, we make sense of life together - often through storytelling. The ways in which we do that affects and reflects individual and relational health.

Selected Interactional Storytelling Research

Koenig Kellas, J., Baker, J., Minniear, M., & Cardwell, M. (2020). Communicated perspective-taking (CPT) and storylistening. Testing the impact of CPT in the context of friends telling stories of difficulty. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
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Koenig Kellas, J., Carr, K., Kranstuber, H., & DiLillo, D. (2017). The Communicated
Perspective-Taking Rating System and links to well-being in marital conflict. Personal Relationships, 24, 185-202.

Koenig Kellas, J., Kranstuber, H., Willer, E. K., & Carr, K. (2015). The benefits and risks of
storytelling and storylistening over time: Experimentally testing the expressive writing paradigm in the context of interpersonal communication. Health Communication, 30, 843-858.

Koenig Kellas, J., & Trees, A. R. (2005). Rating interactional sense-making in the process of joint storytelling. In V. Manusov (Ed.) The sourcebook of nonverbal measures:  Going beyond words (pp. 281-294). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Koenig Kellas, J., & Trees, A. R. (2006). Finding meaning in difficult family experiences: Interaction processes during joint family storytelling. Journal of Family Communication, 6, 49-76 This publication is consistently rated in Journal of Family Communication’s Top 10 most cited articles in a 3-year period.

Koenig Kellas, J., Trees, A. R., Schrodt, P., LeClair-Underberg, C., & Willer, E. (2010). Exploring links between well-being and interactional sense-making in married couples’ jointly told stories of stress. Journal of Family Communication, 10, 174-193. Received 2010 Journal of Family Communication Article of the Year Award.

Koenig Kellas, J., Willer, E. K., & Trees, A. R. (2013). Communicated perspective-taking:
Spouses’ perceptions of each others’ behaviors during stories of marital stress. Southern Communication Journal, 78, 326-351.
 
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  • Home
  • About
  • Research
    • Meet Narrative Nebraska
    • Retrospective Storytelling
    • Interactional Storytelling
    • Translational Storytelling
  • Teaching
  • Press/Media
  • Participate