Family Process is a quarterly peer-reviewedacademic journal covering research on family system issues, including policy and applied practice. It is published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Family Process Institute. Since 2007, the journal publishes its abstracts in Chinese and Spanish in addition to English. Family Process publishes original articles, including theory and practice, philosophical underpinnings, qualitative and quantitative clinical research, and training in couple and family therapy, family interaction, and family relationships with networks and larger systems.
Abstracting and indexing
The journal is abstracted and indexed in: According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2014 impact factor of 3.0 ranking it 1st out of 40 journals in the category "Family Studies" and 21st out of 119 journals in the category "Clinical Psychology".
History
The journal was established in 1962 by Nathan Ackerman, Donald deAvila Jackson, and Jay Haley as a mutual project of the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto and the Family Institute, later to be named the Ackerman Institute for the Family, in New York City. Haley became the first editor-in-chief. During this decade, the journal was sold for $1,000 to what would become the Family Process Institute. Don Bloch became the second editor. Included in the journal during his tenure was the development of the many types of family therapy models, emphasis on the family life cycle, culture, immigration, marital therapy, and gender. In the early 1980s, Bloch retired as editor, and Carlos Sluzki became the new editor. Under his leadership, the journal became more focused on the diversity of families. Peter Steinglass became the editor in the 1990s. Two different trends appear: a growth of empirical research and the advancement of evidence-based and evidence-informed models of treatment, and the unfolding of the narrative approach in family therapy. These different paradigms, belief systems, sets of assumptions, and approaches to knowledge inhabited the journal side by side. Randomized clinical trials were reported in the journal for the first time. From 1998-2003, the editorship passed to Carol Anderson, the journal's first woman editor. In the first decade of the 21st century, Evan Imber-Black became editor. During Imber-Black's editorship, the journal published both clinical and research issues on such topics as divorce, Latino families, asthma, and interdisciplinary training. The New Voices initiative was also created. During Evan Imber-Black's time as editor the first translations into Spanish appeared along with translated abstracts into simple Chinese and Spanish. In 2012, Jay Lebow became the current editor. Video abstracts are now available online for many of the journal's articles, and the first Chinese translation of a full article was published in the journal in 2012. In 2012 Family Process published issue on family therapy. In 2013 Family Process published another special issue on couple's therapy.
Social media
In January 2012, Family Process established their first YouTube page that highlights video abstracts, discussions from a wide array of authors, information on upcoming quarterly issues of the journal, and Chinese translations available for many articles and video abstracts. The Family Process Twitter page is updated daily with current events, links to the diverse published articles, and offers the latest tweets, retweets, and favorites that Family Process has to offer. Facebook has been a part of the Family Process system since 2012 and ever since, it has offered our followers up to date information on current and upcoming issues, links to author's video abstracts to their published work, and information on upcoming events and opportunities
Virtual issues
Virtual issues are a collection of already published Family Process articles encompassing a theme of some sort. Contents and topics of articles include LGBTQ families in therapy, couple therapy and narrative therapy in the 21st century. Each issue is dedicated to the rich history of some aspect of family research and practice. These issues bring many decades worth of clinical and theoretical concepts, as well as the research that has helped shape many types of research and therapy. Readers will learn from the founding voices in the field, as well as those who have contributed current methods for family therapy. Through reading these issues, readers will be able to see how much the field of family therapy has grown in its ability to acknowledge a diverse range of problems and populations, as well as learn more about the diverse range of topics provided.
