Edith A. Lewis

Use of African-American Family Structures and Functioning to Address the Challenges of European-American Postdivorce Families.

The experience of African-American families is used to inform European-American postdivorce families, including stepfamilies. Strategies and coping mechanisms that stem from a pedi-focal definition offamily and are used in African-American families are suggested for postdivorce families to aid in their struggles with: welfare of dependent children, confusion about family roles and household boundaries, and the very definition offamily. Implications for theory development, research, policy, and practice are included.

Theoretical Contributions from Social and Cognitive-Behavioral Psychology

Psychology is the science of the psyche or mind (Hebb, 1974). By definition, psychology has been the study of individuals, particularly the mental processes and behavior of individuals or, in the case of social psychology, nonfamilial groups of individuals. Therefore, psychology has had no explicit theory about family structure or functioning. Aspects of theories in psychology that do address the family have been extensions of theories about the individual; that is, family variables, especially parent-child relationships, have been used to predict outcomes in the individual’s development, personality, or behavior pattern. Of course, the way these family variables were conceptualized and measured reveals implicit theories about coupling and families within the various subdisciplines of psychology.

Toward a Tapestry of Impassioned Voices: Incorporating Praxis into Teaching about Families

In 1991, twenty-seven faculty members on the University of Michigan campus came together to talk about our collective struggles with multicultural teaching in our respective disciplines. We found that we had many strengths and challenges in common and we used the opportunity to share strategies, questions, references, and exercises we had found useful in our work with undergraduate and graduate students. Concurrently, a campus-wide group calling itself the Faculty Against Institutional Racism (FAIR) formed in response to widespread incidents of gender, racial, and ethnic discrimination on the campus. This group developed a cadre of distinguished teachers (FAIRteach) who were willing to share their expertise with campus faculty interested in improving their teaching. The original group of 27 faculty members cooperated in the compilation of a volume entitled Multicultural Teaching in the University (Schoem, Frankel, Zuniga, & Lewis, 1993), which incorporated the lessons all had learned from these and other opportunities for multicultural teaching within a large research-oriented University. The interweaving of these 27 voices allowed the faculty participants to return to sometimes hostile environments and struggle with ways of incorporating issues of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and ability into our scholarship and teaching. Since that time, many of us have continued to develop opportunities to meet with our colleagues to discuss these issues, and have often shared our expertise with other faculty and school administrators on campuses across the country through workshops, seminars, training events, and multicultural organizational development action projects (Douvan, Lewis, Aparicio, & Schoem, 1993; Frankel, 1993). In 1993, I was privileged to serve as a discussant for the Feminism and Family Studies Sections symposium on Impassioned Teaching held at the National Council on Family Relations annual meeting during which the papers by Thompson, Allen, and Marks were first presented. It was clear to me then, as now, that their papers, incorporating different perspectives on pedagogical approaches, were a part of this same interweaving process. One goal of the process is to help students and faculty understand multicultural teaching as a part of the academic excellence, academic freedom, and critical inquiry enterprises of the 1990s global perspective on higher education (hooks, 1994; Mattai, 1992; Schoem et al., 1993). Academic freedom, academic excellence, and critical inquiry, as can be gleaned from these articles, have multiple definitions, not a single, narrow one, as is claimed by detractors of multicultural teaching (National Association of Scholars, 1988; Steele, 1989). Although these three articles are focused on areas of family studies, the authors also address larger themes that have importance across academic and practice disciplines. The purpose of this commentary is to illuminate some of these themes, their theoretical bases, and their importance in multicultural teaching about families. Through the presentation of these themes, some of the criticism of multicultural teaching and, indeed, a multicultural perspective itself, will be addressed in an attempt to further the dialogue among all who participate in instruction about families. COMMON THEMES People Teaching for Change Multicultural teaching has as one of its basic tenets a praxis perspective, that is, a focus on simultaneous critical self-reflection and action (Freire, 1972; Lather, 1986; Lewis, 1993). The praxis philosophy has been written about most eloquently by Paulo Freire (1972, 1994), whose work has influenced many others who have subsequently written about multicultural teaching (Butler & Schmitz, 1992; hooks, 1994; Schoem et al., 1993). Gramsci, the Italian philosopher of the 20th century, suggested that educators form groups to address the ways in which their teaching informed and was informed by their world views (Lather, 1986). …

Book Review: Violence in the Black Family: Correlates and ConsequencesViolence in the Black Family: Correlates and Consequences. Edited by HamptonRobert L.Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989. 274 pp.

This encyclopedic volume begins provocatively by detailing several “unkept promises” of family violence writings. Among the unkept promises of greatest interest to the authors is that “research will answer the difficult questions and lead to the development of efficient and effective treatments.” Throughout the book, the authors endeavor to address the research that does exist in an organized and disciplined fashion and to suggest improvements in practice. The authors focus on the commonalities among types of family violence. They first show the consistencies in the correlates of physical abuse, sexual abuse, conjugal violence, and elder abuse. Drawing on an ecological model, they sort thirty-four contributors (for example, social isolation, depression, religiousness) into three categories: social environment, psychological environment, and family processes. References that support the authors’ claim that most correlates of one type of abuse are correlated to all types of family violence suggest the thoroughness of their investigation and support the soundness of their basic premise. However, the authors steer clear of some controversies. They report no evidence that victim characteristics are correlated with sexual abuse or conjugal violence and leave substance abuse out of their list of correlates that cut across types of family violence. They later argue that research does not indicate a causal relationship between alcohol and family violence-at least, alcohol cannot stand alone as a causal factor. This assertion is odd, given their general belief that family violence results from a combination of factors and their appropriate shunning of the search for causality. Perhaps the authors rely too heavily on the idea that alcohol abuse is an excuse for violence. However, this notion does not hold well given the many violent acts that perpetrators commit without any concern about excuses. This confusion stems in part from the authors’ occasional overgeneralizations across types of family violence. Certainly, alcohol is used as an excuse for conjugal violence. This phenomenon is much less clear, however, in physical, sexual, and elder abuse. Although this criticism may seem quibbling, it suggests the difficulty of maintaining accuracy while aiming at such a broad target. More difficult than identifying common characteristics of families at high risk for violence is the task of identifying common characteristics of interventions to serve such families. However, the section on clinical work in family violence takes an admirable shot at it. This section addresses special populations and problems (for example, interviewing the allegedly sexually abused preschool child) and the legal context for much family-violence work. However, the social service context is not discussed; that is, how do clinicians work with child welfare case managers, women’s shelter staff, and adult protective services? The clinical-intervention section does consider individual, group, and family therapies as well as concrete services and education as interventions for each of the four kinds of family violence. Although an admirable endeavor, describing such a large matrix of types of violence and types of treatment inevitably shortchanges descriptions of each kind of intervention. On the more positive side, this book casts intervention commonalities into relief. Practitioners who have generic practices, instructors who teach about various kinds of family violence, and scholars who build on the authors’ efforts to find links among acts of family violence will welcome this effort. This ambitious book by a psychologist and an attorney is an important addition to the family-violence field. It helps redress shortcomings in the field. Especially striking is that despite the fact that most interventions continue to be designed to alter individual and family characteristics, the social environment is a much more significant correlate of violence than are individual or family traits.