ABSTRACT
Social science researchers have commonly used the structure of families to create typologies of families (Zimmerman, 1947; Popenoe, 1993). Although therapists include structure in the assessment of any family, the field of marriage and family therapy encourages the inclusion of yet another measure—one of process. There has been an enormous amount of research on family process, but the most notable contributions of Kantor and Lehr (1975) and Broderick (1993) represent some of the typologies of families that utilize process and consider the “modes of operation” within a family as a central component of their typology.
