ABSTRACT
The field of family studies is a complicated entity, intersecting numerous disciplines and areas of inquiry. As Stephen (2001) states, “the study of intimacy, courtship, marriage and family, parenting, and relationships between family process and individual development comprises an interdiscipline with contributions from nearly every corridor in the sciences and humanities” (p. 91). The area is so large that the pool of articles, from just communication journals over the last 40 years, as identified by Stephen (2001) in his computer-assisted textual analysis of the family literature, comprised a database of 33,000 entries.
