Journal of Family Theory & Review最新文献

Traditional clinical supervision models in Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) often reinforce hierarchical norms that marginalize Black clinicians' cultural knowledge and lived experience. This article presents the Bidirectional Intersectional Supervision (BIS) Model, an equity-centered framework grounded in Black feminist epistemologies. BIS reimagines supervision as a collaborative, relational process structured around three core commitments: epistemic justice, intersectional reflexivity, and relational accountability. Through practices such as reciprocal learning, collaborative decision-making, reciprocal feedback, and integration of new knowledge, BIS transforms supervision into a site of mutual growth, critical inquiry, and structural resistance. The model offers practical strategies for supervisors while addressing institutional and socio-political barriers to implementation. By embedding justice into the supervision pedagogy, BIS advances more inclusive and culturally responsive clinical training, affirming the knowledge contributions of marginalized supervisees as central, not supplemental, to therapeutic competence.

An intersectionality framework was utilized to investigate how sexism, racism, classism, and anti-transgender bias played a role in one custody case involving a transgender child. This case study—the story of a Black Latina affirming mother, who underwent a seven-year custody battle with the white father of their biracial transgender daughter—provided an opportunity to consider ways that intersecting biases can work to oppress affirming parents and their transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) children through the family court system. Such custody decisions are happening amidst the larger political climate, which has become deeply hostile and dangerous for TGD youth and their affirming families, perhaps in conjunction with, or as part of, the larger backlash against DEI advancements. Transformative suggestions are shared for addressing the existing inequalities and injustices in family court revealed through our analysis.

As digital platforms increasingly shape how families connect and gather information, family science must adapt its communication strategies to remain relevant and impactful. The Journal of Family Theory & Review (JFTR) Digital Scholarship Board (DSB) was created to translate scholarly insights into accessible content for scholars, practitioners, and the public. Using conceptual scaffolding from Bronfenbrenner's bioecological model and insights about media framing, we examine how the DSB functions within the virtual microsystem, linking academic research to individuals through mediated communication. Drawing on 10 years of DSB history and engagement data, we examine how shifting digital infrastructures reshaped the DSB's strategies and reach. We discuss tensions related to mistrust in science, platform transitions, content format, and academic labor that underlie this work. Ultimately, we argue that digital scholarship is vital to the public relevance of family science and offer lessons for sustaining meaningful research dissemination in a rapidly evolving digital ecosystem.

This paper reflects on the experiences of two women cohabiting with heterosexual partners who have children from previous marriages. Using duoethnography, we explore the challenges and possibilities of sustaining relationships and managing shared spaces in these complex family structures. Through a queer theoretical lens, we examine how non-traditional family arrangements disrupt conventional gender roles and challenge nuclear family ideals. Unlike formalized stepfamily roles, cohabiting women occupy ambiguous positions, resisting societal caregiving expectations and rigid stepparent identities—dynamics that influence their personal and professional lives. Our findings contribute to stepfamily literature by centering the perspectives of cohabiting women, revealing how their roles remain fluid and continuously negotiated rather than predetermined. In doing so, we challenge the assumption that women in stepfamilies must inevitably adopt maternal roles. Ultimately, we advocate for broader recognition of diverse family forms and for social and organizational policies that better accommodate the complexities of contemporary relational arrangements.

As global family structures diversify and marginalized communities gain visibility, traditional health disparity frameworks like Minority Stress Theory remain limited by their individualistic focus and fail to capture how chronic marginalization impacts families collectively. In response, we propose the Minority Family Stress Model (MFSM), a family health disparity mechanism framework that situates minority stress within ecological family systems. MFSM reconceptualizes minority stress as a multi-level, relational, and dynamic process operating within families, emphasizing how minority family identity moderates the impact of external and intrafamilial stressors on family health. By capturing how families interpret, negotiate, and adapt to minority stress across individual, subsystem, and whole-system levels, MFSM addresses critical gaps in current health disparities research. This model offers a paradigm shift from viewing minority stress as an intrapsychic burden to understanding it as a family-wide force, advancing contextually grounded, family-centered approaches to research, policy, and intervention across diverse marginalized populations.

Early general systems theorists proposed a key difference between living systems and physical systems is the widespread presence of equifinality and multifinality among living organisms. That is, in living systems, there are often variable pathways to the same outcomes (equifinality), or the same starting conditions can lead to disparate outcomes (multifinality). Family scientists, however, frequently use methods (adapted from the physical sciences) that fail to reflect these characteristics within their statistical models. In this paper, we propose and provide a preliminary proof-of-concept of how an outcome-partitioned set of person-centered analyses might be used to develop alternative models that more comprehensively capture equifinality and multifinality in living systems. This approach balances the needs for parsimony and utility in family theories and models of human development, relationships, and family systems while recognizing the diversity within which individuals and families navigate many pathways to success, difficulty, or something in-between.