ABSTRACT
While the above title may not be as figuratively eloquent as many of the article titles reviewed as a basis for this chapter, the title does articulate the chapter’s purpose: to review family communication research published in communication journals during the past 20 years. This chapter extends the work presented in the first edition of this handbook and provides a sense of the current state of research as a backdrop for the other chapters contained within this edition. The “theory” chapter in the first edition of The Handbook of Family Communication
(Stamp, 2004) examined the literature in family studies so as to identify the perspectives of inquiry, theories, and concepts most commonly used within family relationships research. In order to accomplish these goals, Stamp reviewed 1,254 articles, taken from 12 journals over a 12 year timeframe. These included eight journals within the communication discipline (Communication Monographs [CM], Communication Quarterly [CQ], Communication Studies [CS], Human Communication Research [HCR], Journal of Applied Communication Research [JACR], Journal of Communication [JC], Southern Communication Journal [SCJ], and Western Journal of Communication [WJC]) and four interdisciplinary journals (Journal of Marriage and the Family [JMF], Journal of Social and Personal Relationships [JSPR], Personal Relationships [PR], and Journal of Family Communication [JFC]). The 2004 review identified the 16 most frequently used theories in family research and
over 2,000 concepts which were then organized into 28 general categories. The review also indicated that 92 percent of the articles were empiricist in orientation. Finally, a grounded theory model of family relationships was generated from the concepts identified in the literature. The initial goals of this chapter are similar in terms of identifying perspectives of
inquiry, theories, and concepts in the family literature, with three key differences. First, since the four interdisciplinary journals comprised over 90 percent of the articles reviewed for the first chapter, the focus here is narrowed to family communication research, rather
than family relationships research. Second, as the first chapter examined a concentrated 12 year timeframe, the focus here is to review a longer timeframe so as to identify trends within the family communication literature. And, third, while the first chapter developed a grounded theoretical model from the data, the focus here is to use an existing template, taken from previous literature, to frame the concepts, theories, and contexts. The specific questions guiding this inquiry are:
RQ1 How are the different research perspectives-empiricist, interpretive, and criticalrepresented in family communication research?
