MU Department of Communication - College of Arts and Science - University of Missouri

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Colleen Colaner

Dr. Colleen Colaner's research centers on the communicative construction and maintenance of personal, social, and family identities. A major focus of her research is communication in adoptive families, specifically examining how parental communication facilitates the formation of an adoptive identity and sustains open adoption relationships with birth families. Colleen also researches the links between family communication and religious identity, examining how parental communication influences the development of religious identities as well as the communicative management occurring when parents and children have differing religious orientations. Currently, Colleen is involved in a series of projects funded by the Organization for Research on Women and Communication focusing on the intergenerational transmission of mothering, feminist, and generativity identities via gender socialization in mother-daughter dyads. Colleen's work has been published in Sex Roles, Journal of Family Communication, and Communication Studies. She has also presented her work at a number of regional and national conferences, receiving two top paper awards. Colleen has served as a reviewer for Journal of Family Communication as well as the family and interpersonal divisions of the National Communication Association and the Central States Communication Association.

During her graduate career, Colleen was the recipient of the University of Nebraska Graduate Fellowship ( selected by the University) and Centennial Fellowship ( selected by the Communication Studies Department) in recognition of her excellence in research. She was also selected for a number of competitive conferences focusing on graduate student mentoring including NCA's Doctoral Honors Seminar and CSCA Young Scholar's Masters Class.

Frequently Taught Courses
COMMUN 3561 - Relational Communication
COMMUN 9330 - Special Topics in Interpersonal Communication – Communication
in Discourse Dependent and Understudied Families  

Research Interests
Identity in family and interpersonal relationships

The role of communication in the creation and maintenance of personal, family, and various social identities (e.g. feminist identities, religious identities, adoptive identities, and work/family identification)

The communicative management of divergent identities
The role of communication in facilitating individual and relational wellbeing

Selected Recent Publications
Colaner, C. W. & Kranstuber, H. (2010). “Forever kind of wondering”: Communicatively managing uncertainty in adoptive families. Journal of Family Communication , 10 , 236-255.

Colaner, C. W. (2009). Exploring the communication of Evangelical families: The impact of Evangelical gender role ideology on family communication patterns . Communication Studies , 60 , 97-113 .

Braithwaite, D. O., Breshears, D., & Colaner, C. W. (2009). Weddings. In H. T. Reis & S. Sprecher (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Human Relationships (Vol. 3, pp. 1687-1688). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Colaner, C. W., & Giles, S.M. (2008). The baby blanket or the briefcase: The impact of Evangelical gender role ideologies on career and mothering aspirations of female Evangelical college students . Sex Roles, 58, 526-534 .

Colaner, C. W. & Warner, S.C. (2005). The effect of egalitarian and complementarian gender role attitudes on career aspirations in female undergraduate college students. Journal of Psychology and Theology , 33 , 225-229.


Colleen CColleen Colaner

Assistant Professor

education: PhD, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (2011)
email: colanerc@missouri.edu
office: 212 Switzler Hall
phone: 573-882-3522
focus area: Interpersonal