ABSTRACT
In most family studies, certainly including this one, descriptions of family functioning have been guided by clinically-based theories that argue for the importance of considering the family as a system when we try to understand adaptation and dysfunction in children’s development (Minuchin, 1974). In this chapter, we present one approach to a family-level analysis (see Wagner & Reiss, 1995) of links among family process, family structure, and children’s school outcomes, using measures that attempt to characterize the family as a whole rather than assessing one or more of the relationship pairs in the family (mother-father, mother-child, father-child, sibling-sibling).
