Micro-Authority Transactions in Family Conversations: How Parents and College-Directed Adolescents Use Language to Claim, Assign, or Reject Personal Authority and Autonomy.

This study describes micro-authority transactions as instances of Williams' personal authority in the family system (PAFS), an autonomy-linked concept. The study defines micro-authority as power positions taken by persons in interpersonal conversation. The site of these enactments is conversation about college choice between parents and adolescents. The method is based on the speech theory of Austin, which posits that persons do things with speech acts, and upon the positioning theory of Harre and van Langenhove, which posits that persons in conversation take moral positions from turn to turn that give, take, or reject control of the conversation. A key part of the study is a new analytical coding system that records deixic devices used, performatives used, positions taken, and power type used, in addition to other descriptive devices. One of these descriptive tools is the serpentine model from Pearce and Cronen's coordinated management of meaning (CMM) model. In addition, the study links authority acts to autonomy claims by offspring, using another analytical innovation. That system tracks the series of authority and autonomy moves of an autonomy claim until its confirmation or abandonment. The findings suggest that most parents and adolescent offspring in this study enact very different patterns of authority positions, but that some of the offspring participants evidenced more effective autonomy and authority patterns more like parents, consistent with Hofer and Sassenberg. Further, the study finds evidence of personal authority and budding autonomy. It suggests three possible classifications of adolescent autonomy: autonomy capable, autonomy threshold, and non-autonomous.;Keywords: Authority, autonomy, micro-authority, individuation, family systems, conversation, speech theory, positioning theory, CMM, coordinated management of meaning, interpersonal communication, adolescent development, power, parenting, PAFS, personal authority in the family system.