The Rules-Based Process of Revealing/Concealing the Family Planning Decisions of Voluntarily Child-Free Couples: A Communication Privacy Management Perspective

This study explains how members of voluntarily child-free (VCF) couples make unsolicited disclosures to social network members about their family-planning decision. Thirtytwo members of VCF couples were interviewed. Communication privacy management (Petronio, 2002) was used as the theoretical framework to discern the salient characteristics that lead to such disclosures. Participants reported the following interrelated processes as comprising how they revealed/concealed their family-planning information: (a) the rules-driven structure of revealing the child-free decision to social network members, (b) confidant selection, and (c) the salient characteristics of concealing the decision from others. These findings contribute to a growing body of knowledge on familyplanning communication and privacy management.