Current Approaches to Understanding Family Diversity: An Overview of the Special Issue

Abstract

The Call for Papers for this issue on family diversity encouraged articles that focus on issues or programs related to promoting understanding of a wide variety of types of families (e.g., ethnic or racial minority, gay/lesbian, singleparent, stepparent) or that diversity in family processes (e.g., parenting styles, division of family labor, communication). The articles that are published in this special issue nicely represent the foci of this Call for Papers. The articles address such topics as values regarding families, definitions of families, single-parent families, stepfamilies, gay stepfathers, lesbian mothers, African-American families, family structure differences in division of household labor, parenting behaviors and their relations to child adjustment in different family structures, family diversity education, and the translation of assessment instruments into another language. Despite the wide-ranging nature of these articles, they center on a common theme: families vary in many important ways and family professionals need to be sensitive to and promote understanding of both the similarities and differences across families.