Researching Children and Families: Differences in Approaches of Child and Family Specialists

The present commentary was written in response to an earlier paper (Endsley & Brody, 1981) that documented the physical and professional isolation of child development and family researchers. Three concerns that influence the conceptualization and design of child and family development research are discussed: a concern for the observation of behavior and multiple data gathering methods, a concern for method variance, and a concern for discriminative validity. The authors believe that an open discussion of these concerns will lead to a frank dialogue between child and family researchers concerning the research approaches of each area in order to improve the quality of their efforts and in order to insure that their research will have greater utility among child and family practitioners. Practitioners as well as researchers have an important stake in the way that knowledge is obtained for its utility is only as good as the quality of data that are obtained.