Greetings MFR Family,
I am delighted to begin my appointment as Editor-in-Chief of this prestigious journal. My predecessors, Drs. Susan Steinmetz, Gary Peterson, and Walter Schumm forged a path that I hope to continue and nudge further. I am grateful for this opportunity to continue the legacy of providing the scientific community with theoretically and methodologically sound content about family life. I offer thanks to outgoing Editor-in-Chief Dr. Walter Schumm for his help and willingness to ensure a smooth transition of leadership. Marriage and Family Review (MFR) is poised to become an exclusive and highly regarded source across disciplines concerned about family-related issues in the field.
As the editor, my time will include a focus on the following priorities:
Ensure high quality and cutting-edge content about diverse families.
Encourage primary studies as tools to inform practice and future reviews.
Encourage more in-depth and nuanced reviews about given families in a given context.
Profile the work of authors who have spent their careers research a particular topic on families or a type of family.
Expand MFR’s influence through social media.
As current and future practice, we will continue to accept primary studies; however, our “bread and butter” will still be an emphasis on reviews about families. In the spirit of Bornstein’s specificity principle, MFR content should discuss family-related issues with the following questions in mind: which families are under study, under what conditions, during what historical time period, during which phase of family life, etc.
Additionally, MFR content should cover what works and/or what does not work in or with families, using the same line of “what questions.” For example, in parent–child socialization literature, there was a major shift in thinking (unidirectional vs. bidirectional processes). Through systemic research, this shift in thinking and a more accurate understanding of parent–child relations was able to occur.
It is my hope that content published in MFR is at the cutting edge of literature that helps to inform scholars, practitioners, and policy, as it relates to families. I believe strongly encouraging our authors to submit work along this line of inquiry, and having our reviewers evaluate manuscripts with these types of questions in mind helps us to continually improve the relevancy and quality of MFR content.
A significant issue in the social science journal enterprise is identifying scholars that are willing to provide consistent and timely reviews. This also requires that editors send manuscripts that have good potential to be published in papers. We also want to make sure that we cover a diversity of family structures and dynamics. Families differ along many lines and academic literature should reflect this diversity.
We want MFR to be the primary resource scholars choose for content and preferred destination when considering where to submit their work. This requires us to have relevant and accurate content about families. We hope to achieve this by expanding our social media reach and word of mouth. For the former, I would like to announce our new Facebook and Twitter accounts. The goal is to use these platforms to share journal content and to also allow select authors an opportunity to discuss aspects of their published papers. For the latter, we hope that each of you will be a positive ambassador for the journal and recommend our content to your personal and professional contacts.
Again, I am delighted to serve as Editor-in-Chief of MFR. I look forward to collaborating with you in this venture.
Please “meet” my editorial assistant, Chiquita M. Hughes. Chiquita has over 20 years of experience in K-12 education and is currently a doctoral student at Miami. She will assist to promote the reputation, academic success, and prosperity of the Journal.
Sincerely,