A Communication Privacy Management Analysis of an End of Life Admission

Sample

As individuals age, privacy concerns adapt and change, in conjunction with developmental and life-course changes (Petronio, 2002). Some of these changes can be identity-threatening and hard to talk about for aging seniors. For example, having to rely more on family for finances and bill payment, transportation, healthcare, personal care, and daily life issues can be difficult to discuss because they often result in adjustments to family disclosure norms and shifts in the kinds of private information that gets shared within a family (Egbert, Child, Lin, Savery, & Bosley, 2017). This case study applies Communication Privacy Management (CPM) Theory to understand the mutual needs of privacy and disclosure in the context of deathbed disclosures and unfinished privacy management business. We first highlight the Communication Privacy Management theoretical framework and then discuss a case involving changes in privacy management systems that may occur in families due to unexpected deathbed disclosures.