Introduction to mid-decade Special Issue on Theory and Methods

This issue, Volume 86, number 5, is the sixth contribution to the Journal of Marriage and Family's tradition of mid-decade issues on theory and method. The objective of the mid-decade Special Issues is to showcase theoretical and methodological advances in family research over the last decade, with the aim of guiding future family science research. Like the five previous issues, the 2024 issue includes invited and author-initiated contributions. The JMF Editorial Board and deputy editors provided suggestions on topics and authors of potential contributions. Invited and author-initiated contributions went through the standard review process, some through multiple rounds, and were evaluated by experienced reviewers selected for their topic and methodological expertise. The issue is stronger because of the reviewers' intellectual contributions.

The issue includes work elaborating theoretical developments, the relation between theory and method, issues in research design, advances in measurement and analytic strategies, and original empirical studies that integrate conceptual and analytic advances. Many contributions are from early career scholars, a promising signal of the vibrant future of family science research. Much of the featured work engages with how best to conceptualize, measure, analyze, or center diverse families in our scholarship, including diversity within social groups, across both meso and macro contexts. Collectively, the work underscores the need to act on measurement and analytic developments to advance inclusion and equity for minoritized individuals and families in our contemporary world.

Work that represents theoretical developments includes Letiecq's exposition of “marriage fundamentalism” as a central mechanism of family inequality; Dow and Gordon's discussion of the core components of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and their implications for family scholarship; and Robinson and Stone's conceptualization of a trans family systems framework to highlight how cisnormative investments and divestments influence trans individuals' relations with family and how these processes might be reimagined or disrupted. In addition, Qian and Hu develop a multi-level digital ecology of family life framework and show how this framework can be used to investigate the practices, presentation, and implications of “online” families and meso-level online communities situated within macro-level systems.

Six articles focus on the relation between theory and method. Doan, Quadlin, and Khanna discuss the trade-offs inherent in the novel (to family science) experimental approach and provide a guide to best practices in design to generate sound data capable of testing causal effects. Williams, Curtis, Boe, and Jensen highlight QuantCrit as a necessary corrective theoretical and analytic approach for studying processes of structural racial inequities and marginalized families broadly. Goldberg and Allen highlight key trends in qualitative family science research and elaborate on how practicing analytic flexibility in the design, analysis, and reporting of qualitative research allows for creative discoveries in the research process that might be suppressed through rigid adherence to institutionalized templates. Homan, Everett, and Brown develop a framework of structural racism, sexism, and sexual and gender minority oppression, offer generative approaches for conceptualizing and measuring structural inequities at different levels and across different contexts, and present a roadmap for applying a structural inequities framework. Riina synthesizes theoretical perspectives on the link between neighborhoods and families and provides guidance on defining, measuring, and analyzing the mechanisms through which neighborhoods affect and interact with family processes and outcomes. Thomeer, Brantley, and Hernandez highlight the benefits of multi-method approaches and offer step-by-step blueprints for mixed-methods research, including examples of research questions across multi-part studies and guidance on how to carefully attend to decisions on the timing of different parts of mixed-methods studies.

Williams discusses strategies to reduce trade-offs between designing large and diverse samples that generate rich data on family dynamics and outcomes and high respondent burden. The solutions offered are innovative use of existing data and collecting primary data through remote observation, digital trace data, and “big-team” collaborations. Three articles interrogate cultural, political, and legal definitions of family and propose measurement approaches intended to disrupt the sedimentation of the “Standard, North-American Family.” Fish, Reczek, and Ezra call for researchers to challenge uncritical presentations of cisgender, heterosexual, White, often middle-class individuals and families as “representative.” Compton and Kaufman show how an improved measure of relationship status and analysis of open-text data can provide new insights on the prevalence of and change in queer families, unmarried partnerships, nonmonogamous relationships, and more accurate representations of heterosexual relationships. Julian, Kamp Dush, and Manning critically overview current advances in the measurement of sexual and gender minority families in five population-based surveys, provide best practices for analyses of these data, and offer recommendations to further improve representation of sexual and gender diverse (SGD) families in population-level data.

Three articles offer advances in analytic strategies. Sun makes the case for using supervised machine learning to address the inherent limitations of confirmatory research testing complex, multifaceted theories with regression-based analytic strategies that demand parsimony. Mund, Park, and Nestler compare different approaches to studying between- and within-person variation in family science research, develop and apply dyadic extensions of Cross-Lagged Panel Models (CLPM), and offer guidance on assessing the appropriateness, feasibility, and “interpretability” of different approaches to analyzing complex relationships between individuals and families in context and over time. Fallesen, Andersen, and Elwert elaborate methodological advances that move beyond identifying average treatment effects and instead can be used to examine effect heterogeneity across observed and unobserved variables and treatment effect heterogeneity across covariates.

Last, three studies offer integrative advances: original empirical analyses that showcase how the theoretical/analytic advances produce insights obscured by previous theoretical and analytical approaches. Madhavan develops the novel space–time continuum (STC) framework and applies it in her analysis of kinship support in Kenya. Barber and Liao refine and extend Life Course Theory and use sequence analysis and between-within regression analysis of intensive longitudinal data from the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life Study, representing “micro life courses” of aspects of pregnancy risk. Fasang, Gruijters, and Van Winkle develop “the life course boat” perspective that conceptualizes structural factors, meso-level factors, and individual agency as interactive mechanisms that shape family life courses over historical time, place, and social location. The article applies the life course boat perspective to a qualitative case study of fertility trends in Senegal and a quantitative sequence analysis of the destandardization of US family life courses among Baby Boomer and Millennial cohorts.

I will close with a heartfelt thank you to our community of reviewers. This issue would not have come to fruition without the many reviewers who offered developmental and critical feedback to the authors. I am deeply grateful for their intellectual work and time in service to the family science community. I have learned a tremendous amount from a close reading of the initial submissions, the thoughtful reviews, and the final versions of the groundbreaking work in the issue. I am optimistic that the featured articles collectively offer the theoretical and methodological insights and tools necessary to guide innovative, timely, and much-needed family scholarship into the decade to come.