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Abstract
This study assessed the current status and historical evolution of marriage and family-related theoretical concepts within the communication field's literature to determine patterns of introduction and linkage among theoretical concepts. Capitalizing on recent breakthroughs in computer-assisted textual analysis, the study explored the history of family communication scholarship to assess the extent to which the family context appears to have emerged as a coherent area of scholarly focus. The study examines the manner in which the field of communication has approached marriage and family and the web of concepts it has attached to these central terms. Marriage and family-related concepts occurring with high frequency in titles of scholarly articles were identified in a database of 33,000 articles comprehensively covering a 28-year period of the communication field's literature. Concepts culled from the database were linguistically normalized and submitted to cluster analysis to explore the structure of their pattern of interrelationships. Results identified areas of conceptual interconnection, forming a taxonomic description of the field's theoretical investments in the marriage and family area.