ABSTRACT
In recent decades, social scientists increasingly have come to appreciate the importance of the family context in which child development takes place. Carlson and Grotevant (1987b) referred to this as “a dramatic paradigm shift…toward relationships rather than individuals as the unit of analysis” (p. 23). Interest in family relationships spans theoretical orientations, including behavioral, attachment, psychodynamic, and systemic. Thus, the family provides a unifying theme across theories and promises to contribute to the much needed integrative approach called for by developmental psychopathology (Achenbach, 1990; Cicchetti & Cohen, 1995). By the same token, family work has become pivotal to interventions of all types, whether cognitive behavioral (e.g., Howard & Kendall, 1996; Stark, Swearer, Kurowski, Sommer, & Bowen, 1996), interpersonal (Schwartz, Kaslow, Racusin, & Carton, 1998), or psychodynamic (Slipp, 1991). For the theorist, the researcher, and the clinician, in short, the family is the heart of the matter.
