A Conscious and Inclusive Family Studies

Abstract

I argue that family scholars must take bolder steps to engage the tensions between our heritage of positivist science and its postmodern challenges. I also argue that constructing theories, utilizing research methods, and examining substantive issues should be relevant to the diversity of the families we study and to ourselves as members of families. I offer examples of developing an informed reflexive consciousness to broaden the rationalist foundation that dominates family scholarship. For a more inclusive, balanced, and invigorated family studies, our subjective experiences and commitments as researchers should be acknowledged, confronted, and integrated. A family studies that is responsible to our readers, students, selves, and the people whose lives we study requires that we engage the critical intersections of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and age as they define family diversity.

A Family’s Coming Out Process: Systemic Change and Multiple Realities

“…The process did not result in ''one'' definition of diversity but rather opened up the possibility for multiple meanings. The evolution from a ''real'' or an ''objective'' definition of diversity to possible ''multiple'' meanings of diversity shows the potential of reflexivity as an agent that interrogates intellectual ideas with personal experience (Allen 2000). Reflexivity uncovered participants' privileged ways of knowing and recovered knowledge about gay families that had been silenced.…”

Grandchildren's Perceptions of Caring for Grandparents

“…In order to explore the meaning participants gave their caregiving experiences I used symbolic interactionism as a guiding theory and lifespan and life course perspectives as theoretical frameworks. (Allen, 2000). Allowing the researcher to work as an instrument in qualitative studies is "simply to search out a match in one's experience for ideas and actions that the respondent has described in the interview" (McCracken, 1998, p. 19).…”

Looking at Families in Nursing Research: Strategies for Study Design

“…These theories and other life-cycle approaches imply a universal, sequential cycle to family life when they describe the "normal" evolution of a family (Hartrick, 1995). The notion that there are universal patterns of change within family life does not acknowledge the diversity of lived experience and the culture of the majority of families in North America and globally (Allen, 2000;Munford & Sanders, 2003).…”