“Panicked responsibility”: Confidant perspectives of disclosure and information management in university student affairs 

New Series, Vol. 3, No. 3

College students experience a high volume of individual and relational well-being crises and often disclose these struggles to institutional employees who might not have formal training in counseling and mental health services, such as student affairs professionals. Professionals in these roles often develop trusting relationships with students, which might implicitly encourage students to come to them with personal concerns such as interpersonal conflict, sexual harassment, self-esteem, identity development, stress, and time management. Employing Communication Privacy Management theory, this study sought to more deeply understand how student affairs professionals manage these disclosures in their roles supporting student learning and development outside of the classroom. 

Communication Privacy Management theory assumes that individuals have ownership rights over their private information, and when they disclose, they grant their confidant co-ownership rights and responsibilities for managing that information. These parties might engage in privacy regulation by creating privacy rules about how, when, and with whom it is appropriate to share the information, but these rules are subject to breakdown which causes privacy turbulence. Turbulence often occurs when the confidant experiences a dilemma of competing interests to reveal and conceal the private information, such as student affairs professionals’ status as mandatory reporters. Confidants are classified as deliberate confidants (i.e., who encourage or solicit desired disclosure), inferential confidants (i.e., who consider disclosure an inherent dynamic of a given relationship), and reluctant confidants (i.e., who do not desire, solicit, nor expect disclosure).  

The researchers conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with student affairs professionals from 10 different universities in seven different states who had been in their position for at least five months to explore what types of disclosures that they receive from students, how they manage the disclosure information, and their emotional experience in the confidant role. Participants were mostly white (n = 16) women (n = 11) and were also racialized as Hispanic/Latino (n = 1), Black/African American (n = 1), Native American (n = 1), and Other (n = 1). Nine participants were from religious institutions, which the authors acknowledge as a limitation in this study as experiences at these institutions may be qualitatively different from those at public universities. Interview transcripts were analyzed using a step-by-step thematic analysis process to identify and refine key themes to reflect participants’ experiences. 

Participants reported receiving a variety of disclosures from their students ranging from light-hearted to extremely serious; these included personal relationships, seeking university resources, post-graduation plans, sexual orientation, self-harm and suicidal ideation, sexual violence, and familial death. When managing these disclosures, student affairs professionals responded by triaging emergency situations (e.g., encouraging students to grant co-ownership to other parties such as licensed counselors), counseling students in crisis, and proactively avoiding privacy dilemmas by anticipating sensitive disclosures and making their status as mandatory reporters known to the students they serve. The authors point out that Communication Privacy Management research might benefit from exploring additional contexts where potential confidants might employ proactive discursive strategies, such as explicitly disclosing one’s status as a mandatory reporter, to avoid privacy dilemmas.  

Participants also reported a variety of emotional responses to serving in a confidant role. Many participants expressed that receiving disclosures was an “expected surprise” as they generally expected to receive disclosure from students, but the timing, content, and source might have been unexpected. They also reported demonstrating simultaneous solicitation and non-solicitation by (in)directly communicating a tone of openness. This finding directly challenges some of the assumptions of Communication Privacy Management theory as confidants are classified based on these binary categories (i.e., whether disclosure is or is not expected, desired, and/or solicited), but the authors here argue for a more nuanced interpretation of these dimensions that acknowledges their ability to co-occur. Similarly, participants also reported simultaneously desiring and resenting disclosures and experiencing co-occurring stress and emotional weight along with affirmation, fulfillment, and honor at being chosen as a student’s confidant. Participants also experienced “panicked responsibility” which reflected their motivations to respond correctly and helpfully to heavy disclosures. 

These findings provide some theoretical support for initial theorizing on the role of confidants in disclosure episodes and offer support for extensions of this theorizing as well. Namely, this study demonstrates the ambivalent experience in the confidant role and also highlights the importance of the disclosure context (e.g., reduced co-ownership agency because of institutional policy). The authors also suggest that it might be more fruitful to assess confidant types on a continuum rather than distinct categories. Practically, the results of this study suggest that receiving sensitive disclosures is a fairly universal experience for student affairs professionals and thus it is possible and beneficial to train these employees on how they might respond to these topics, how to avoid potential privacy dilemmas by being upfront about mandatory reporting, and addressing related stress and burnout to prevent attrition. Future researchers might wish to more deeply explore why student affairs professionals are chosen as confidants from a student perspective to better understand disclosure dynamics in this context.   

Communication Currents Discussion Questions 

For additional suggestions about how to use this and other Communication Currents in the classroom, see: https://www.natcom.org/publications/communication-currents/integrating-communication-currents-classroom 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS  

Heather L. Davenport is a Doctoral Student in the Department of Communication at Rutgers University. 

Kaitlin E. Phillips is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Baylor University. 

This essay, by R. E. Purtell, translates the scholarly journal article, H. L. Davenport & K. E. Phillips (2025). “Panicked responsibility”: Confidant perspectives of disclosure and information management in university student affairs. Communication Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2025.2559810  

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