Toward More Family-Centered Family Sciences Love, Sacrifice, and Transcendence

Much academic writing on families reflects the ideal of non-involvement and distanced subject matter. Toward More Family-Centered Family Sciences suggests that the family sciences, in their efforts to be scientific, and for a variety of other reasons, have increased the distance between researcher and subject, to the detriment of both. The authors argue that family and kinship ties are transcendent ties, boundary-crossing in numerous ways, and often more comprehensible by intuitive and qualitative methods than by quantitative measurement.

Kathleen S. Bahr is associate professor in the Department of Marriage, Family, and Human Development at Brigham Young University.