Emerging adult confidants’ judgments of parental openness: disclosure quality and post-disclosure relational closeness

Research on openness and disclosure has prioritized the perspectives of disclosers and largely omitted the experiences of confidants. In particular, we contend that it is important to learn more about how emerging adult (EA) confidants perceive parental disclosure episodes and how parental openness manifests in ways that lead to increased intimacy. In Study One, participants’ open-ended descriptions of parental disclosures were thematically analyzed to reveal three dimensions of parental openness: access to information, candor, and relating as peers. These dimensions were developed into quantitative scales and employed to test a conceptual model of post-disclosure outcomes in Study Two. When EA confidants perceived that parents gave them more access to information and treated them more as peers, they reported higher ratings of disclosure quality and, in turn, greater relational closeness following the disclosure.