The relation of mother-daughter communication and Circle Drawing

Pipp, Shaver, Jennings, Lamborn, & Fischer (1985) studied the variations of parent and late adolescent relationships by a retrospective method; Circle Drawing. The first purpose of this study was to compare the results with those of the previous study (Pipp et al., 1985), though the ages of participants were different. Early and late adolescents and their mothers were asked to draw two circles, one representing the daughter and another representing the mother, at three or four periods from infancy to the present. The results showed that the size of the daughters' circles were becoming larger with age whereas the mothers' circles were becoming smaller. The distances between the circles were changed from infancy to the present, namely the distance at the infant period was smaller than at the present. These results showed that the transition for mother-daughter relationships had the same pattern as in the previous study (Pipp et al., 1985). The second purpose of this study was to investigate the correlations between circle drawings and mother-daughter communications in two tasks. The communication tasks were to solve math questions and to cooperate in completing a craft project for which they had to plan the design and complete the finished project. Their utterances during two tasks were coded into fifteen categories based Condon, Cooper & Grotevant (1984). The results showed that some parts of the communications relate well with some aspects of the exercise with circles. That is, the results of this study showed that the mother-daughter relationships expressed by two circles were changing with age, and circle drawings express some parts of the actual communications, too.