Family Paradigm and Family Coping: A Proposal for Linking the Family's Intrinsic Adaptive Capacities to Its Responses to Stress

Abstract

Recently, there has been an increased interest in delineating the strategies by which families cope with stressful and challenging events and circumstances. This essay is an effort to explore the range and variety of such coping strategies, More important, it attempts to show how these strategies are related to one another and to more fundamental adaptive capacities of families; these capacities are manifest in the routines that are typical of the quiescent periods of the families' lives, The relationships we posit are shaped by a theory developing out of an extended series of laboratory and field studies in our center. Kuhn's concept of paradigm has been a helpful organizing metaphor for this theoretical work. It has led us to suspect that a family's adaptive capacities-both its everyday routines as well as its attempts to cope with unusual and stressful events-are shaped by its abiding conception of the social world in which it lives.