Abstract
Considerable research has been conducted on families—how families create, experience, and respond to the world in which they live. The purpose of this chapter is to describe a conceptual framework for studying the family environment which (1) incorporates recent advances in understanding multiple social influences on behavior, (2) recognizes both common and idiosyncratic characteristics of families as social units, (3) identifies research strategies to assess families, and (4) generates hypotheses about the reasons families vary in their functioning. The framework derives from theories and research in psychology, ethology, sociology, anthropology, and demography. We rely most heavily on empirical work in social ecology and in decision making, incorporating elements from existing theories and combining them operationally in our formulation of the family environment.
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Landesman, S., Jaccard, J., Gunderson, V. (1991). The Family Environment. In: Lewis, M., Feinman, S. (eds) Social Influences and Socialization in Infancy. Genesis of Behavior, vol 6. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2620-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2620-3_4
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