CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Coco, A. (1999). I can’t hear you: Barriers to communication in the Roman Catholic culture. The Electronic Journal of Communication [On-line serial] 9 (2, 3, & 4).
© The Electronic Journal of Communication (1999).

ABSTRACT:
This article reports findings from a larger study entitled Catholics’ meaning-making in critical situations (Coco, 1998) and is based on interviews with forty informants. Analytically, I have combined the Sense-Making Methodology’s concept of situation movement state and a typology of communicative strategies to describe how and why participants negotiated dissonant situations with respect to their Catholic faith. One particular situation movement state, wash-out, is analyzed in detail and a summary compared with summary findings of three other situations. Catholics were unable to mobilize such communicative strategies as mediation and consensus. This meant they withdrew physically, emotionally and/or spiritually from stress causing situations. It was found that participants were re-defining what it means to be Catholic.

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See: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistcoco.html