International Developments in Family Theory: A Continuance of the Initial "Pilgrim's Progress"

Abstract

John F. Klein, Gene P. Calvert, T. Neal Garland, and Margaret M. Paloma (1969) in these pages have published an assessment of the use of theory in United States journal articles marriage and the family for the years 1962 through 1968. This paper represents a continuance and extension of that assessment to the family literature of other countries. Such a stock-taking provides a needed additional base line measure for gauging future developments in family theory. Work done in countries other than the United States constitutes an increasingly influential portion of family knowledge. The Minnesota Inventory of Published Research in Marriage and the Family, for example, shows the proportion of foreign language articles has increased from 12 per cent in 1900 to 1964 (Aldous and Hill, 1967) to 30 per cent from 1965 to 1972. Since the Inventory does not attain total coverage, these figures are only rough approximations. They do, however, suggest a trend. This paper follows so far as practicable the Klein et al., format to permit comparisons with their analyses with an updated literature search of the years 1969 and 1970 as well as from 1962 to 1968. In selecting the nations whose literature we proposed to examine, we used the following criteria: (1) we had access to relevant literature from the country and the necessary language skills for translation purposes; (2) the country had social scientists who published in the family area; and (3) at least one socialist country and one non-European country should be represented in the countries inventoried. Based these criteria, the countries we chose were the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany); France; Great Britain; Japan; and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. One among us (Kamiko) analyzed the Japanese literature on location. We surveyed the literature of the other countries at a distance, choosing the publications to be inventoried the basis of recommendations from knowledgeable sociologists.' Not having access to the resources of the Library of Congress or other national libraries, we necessarily sampled rather than inventoried in its entirety the family literature for the countries chosen. The sample unit was any work that had appeared in a publication directed to social scientists. Usually these works took the form of journal articles as was true of the original United States' survey, but we were advised to include books as well as journal articles in our survey of the literature in