ABSTRACT
People frequently struggle with privacy issues everyday (Altman, Vinsel, & Brown, 1981, Alderman & Kennedy, 1995; Petronio, 2000a, 2002). However, making choices about managing private information is often not an individual’s lone plight; instead, decisions about revealing or concealing frequently take place within a group context. Perhaps the most important group to which people belong may be their family. Privacy within the family is critical to the functioning of its group members (Berardo, 1974), although there may be times when the comfort found in maintaining privacy is altered and, instead, becomes a source of discomfort.
