ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the evidence existing about the pluralization of family trajectories. It stresses the shortcomings of the developmental approach of families, which played a leading role in family research for years before being abandoned by many researchers. The configurational perspective offers an alternative to the developmental approach which, while keeping the focus on orderly family changes in the life course, does not assume that family trajectories stick with a standard model. Empirical analysis, rather than a highly abstract and normative model, should be given prominence in the understanding of the development of families. Various innovative statistical techniques shall be used in order to uncover what types of family trajectories best describe individuals from non-clinical and clinical samples. The configurational perspective may do better because it does not stick with a definition of families as nuclear and because it focuses on empirical trajectories at hand rather than on normative models stating how in theory families should develop over time.
