Heather Maloney-Stassen

Maloney-Stassen said Dr. Benjamin Bates is “one of those dream writing partners.” She considers him fluent in piecing together information, and both share interests in advocacy-related academic research. The theoretical frame Maloney-Stassen has worked with most in her research is the ideograph. Along with Dr. Bates, she has analyzed how definitions of words can be influenced by different public viewpoints, which can change over time. Within her research on marriage, Maloney-Stassen has also addressed polygamy and depictions of it in the news or other media. Examples include the HBO program, "Big Love" and the raid on the Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas.

How public opinion shapes language

Jason Klaiber

Alot can change in a decade, even if it goes by in a flash. Just ask Dr. Heather Maloney-Stassen, whose now-awardwinning research turned its focus toward the shift in the popular definition of the term “marriage” over the past 10 years or so.

Presently the director of the communication studies program and the interim program director of English at Cazenovia College, Maloney-Stassen began delving into the subject while only a graduate student at Ohio University. Soon enough, she read through Michael Calvin McGee’s writing on ideographs and became “obsessed” with the concept, particularly as it pertained to language development, public policy and public rhetoric.

In collaboration with one of her professors, Dr. Benjamin Bates, and in search of people who would have just started thinking more seriously about marriage and what it means, she collected data through an independent 2008 study conducted at an undisclosed academic institution in the Midwest.

The college-aged group of 176 participants—a “hodgepodge” of students from urban and rural environments—had yielded a range of free-written answers, but Maloney-Stassen and Bates were able to cut across these interpretations of marriage and find key themes.

Many of those respondents pointed to the importance of love and faithfulness between two people, while others wrote of the ability to stay committed without getting married. The views of a portion drew from the marriages in their families that either crumbled significantly due to abusiveness or ended in divorce.

What also arose back in 2008 was contentiousness surrounding whether or not the respondents saw marriage as a religious entity, especially since the same-sex marriage debate was then more prominent in the public sphere according to Maloney-Stassen.

“People were explicitly saying ‘between a man and a woman,’ or they were saying ‘between two people, no matter their sex, whomever they love,’” Maloney-Stassen said. “It was reflective of the policy agenda at that time because folks didn’t really know where the same sex marriage legislation was gonna go.”

Though they’re seen far and wide as the ritualistic ceremony that cements a marriage, weddings curiously weren’t mentioned as much in this data, she said.

By the time that first paper entitled, “Constructing Marriage: Exploring Marriage as an Ideograph,” was published in early 2010, Maloney-Stassen was a visiting assistant professor at Hamilton College. At that point, she didn’t foresee a re-evaluation that would cite dramatic changes in 10 years’ time, mainly because she had low expectations that federal regulation of same-sex marriage would come to fruition.

“I thought it would be state-by-state and that we’d still have holdouts,” she said. “I really thought that if we collected data in 10 years, we’d have to, based on geography, do a cluster sample and go to states where it was not legal to figure out what was still going on.”

About midway through 2015, however, the Obergefell v. Hodges case—which ended in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision—ruled that states were required to legally recognize same-sex marriage.

Though there were refusals to comply with the issuance of marriage licenses to such couples afterward, Maloney-Stassen said that the federal government was overall quick to enforce compliance, leading to resistance largely being dispelled, especially in what she calls “more progressive states.”

A few years down the line, after noticing the accelerated change in public perception, she and her encouraging mentor Dr. Bates decided to look into collecting a second round of data from the same demographic. The resulting article, “Renewing Vows: A Diachronic Analysis of Marriage as an Ideograph,” ended up seeing the light of day in late 2019 via an online version before being printed in the peer-reviewed journal Qualitative Research Reports in Communication in early 2020.

Maloney-Stassen said that same-sex marriage wasn’t argued against as much in the newer data, perhaps owing to the fact that the students this time around were pre-teens or teenagers when such arrangements were legalized, thus lending them a different perspective than the prior group.

Additionally, references to civil unions dropped, as did mentions of divorce, possibly due to a declining divorce rate since 2010. More so than in the first batch of data, there were respondents who thought of marriage as less of a necessity, aside from the acquisition of a different health insurance plan. Others shared that they believed marriage could be defined by the legality or “contractual” agreement of it as much as anything.

“When somebody says ‘marriage,’ they have a certain expectation of what that’s gonna look like, but for many people, those expectations don’t meet,” Maloney-Stassen said. “Marriage is so abstract that it’s hard to concretize.”

As announced in March, this second research assessment earned the “Article of the Year” award from the Eastern Communication Association (ECA), which focused on the previous calendar year for the category.

“If people read it, that’s just icing on the cake,” Maloney-Stassen said. “But to know that someone read it and recommended it for ‘Article of the Year’ and that somebody else thought ‘hey, that’s a good idea’ was really neat.”

She said that Cazenovia College has been a supportive environment for research as well as an employer that is congratulatory when affiliated work earns accolades.

“Research is a collective effort on a college campus,” said MaloneyStassen, who is also an associate professor at the college. “It’s not me just working in my bubble in my office.”

At Cazenovia College, located on Sullivan Street, Dr. Heather Maloney-Stassen teaches classes such as “Women’s and Gender Studies,” “Nonverbal Communication” and “Introduction to Public Relations.” SWM

Established in 1910, the ECA is the oldest professional communication association in the country. For more information on the organization and its awards/nominations, visit ecasite.org.