The Rise of Family Theory

In 1957, Hill, Katz, and Simpson published a prospectus for an inventory of marriage and family research from 1900 to 1956. A goal of this inventory was “the theoretical organization, where possible, of research findings into a set of interrelated hypotheses and propositions” (p. 89). This article also continued Hill’s earlier work (1951a,b, 1955) of organizing previous research projects by “major conceptual apparatus” (1957, p. 89). Two years later, William J. Goode (1959) published an article on family theory with the subtitle “Horizons in Family Theory.” The content and format of these two articles were dramatically predictive of what was to happen during the 1960s and 1970s in family theory.