She is a professor emeritus at The University of Iowa's department of Communication Studies.
[2] Baxter started her work as a professor at the University of Montana and served her time there from 1975 to 1976.
From 1976 to 1989, she was a faculty member in the Communications Department at Lewis & Clark College, where she had received her undergraduate degree.
Baxter then moved to California where, from 1989 to 1994, she taught in the Rhetoric and Communication Department as well as the Human Development Graduate Group at the University of California-Davis.
[2] Baxter's work focuses on researching family and relational communication.
Relational Dialectics Theory, which was created by Baxter and Barbara Montgomery, has been mentioned in books and scholarly journals and received awards.
Relational Dialectics Theory is recognizing that all communication is the interplay of differences.
She also compares her ideas with relational dialectics with an interview conducted by Em Griffin, an author of A First Look at Communication Theory.
[3] She believes that differences in relationships are what give it a wholeness, where as Bakhtin’s reference to dialogue isn’t used in "the sense of a happy, pleasant experience".
The study used 122 parents and their children to find communication patterns of avoidance, like sexual issues and topics of drinking/drugs, money, and educational progress.
The outcome of this study showed that parents reported higher rule articulation than their children within the three topics.
Miller Book Award, NCA] Baxter, Leslie A.; Braithwaite, Dawn O., eds.