Lawrence H Ganong

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at University of Missouri

Objective To assess the feasibility of implementing a culturally responsive version of Gottman's Seven Principles relationship education program in a community‐based setting for married Arab American adults. Background To provide high‐quality couple and relationship education, it is necessary to acknowledge the population's needs and cultural back...

In this paper, we review the characteristics of Arab immigrants and propose guidelines for couple and relationship education (CRE) programs with Arab immigrant couples. Arab immigrants are a heterogeneous group, yet they share common cultural characteristics and family values that are essential to understand when working with them. Generally, CRE p...

Researchers on LGBTQ+ individuals have largely focused on lesbians or gay men; bisexual individuals often are included in those samples, but they are seldom differentiated in reporting. Little is known, therefore, about the lived experience of bisexual individuals, especially women of color who represent three marginalized groups (i.e., LGBTQ+, wom...

Typologies allow researchers and clinicians to look efficiently across studies and draw conclusions about commonalities and differences related to populations of interest. Typologies also are useful in developing and testing theories. In this study, we conducted a systematic review of 34 typologies related to stepfamilies and stepfamily relationshi...

The fulfilment of Child Support payments following divorce is important to ensure children’s wellbeing. Guided by a model of normative influences, we investigated how individuals perceived Child Support payments in South Korea and the United States and if they varied by child’s gender, custody arrangements, changes in the responsible father’s finan...

Scholars have long recognized that the boundaries of family membership and definitions of family relationships are socially constructed. The social construction of family membership, and the accompanying ambiguity surrounding family language and labels, particularly in complex families who have experienced divorce, remarriage, and other structural...

Objective To examine divorced fathers' views about the appropriateness of disclosures and explore their disclosure strategies. Background Parental disclosures are common occurrences in the context of divorce; they may be harmful or beneficial depending on what information is disclosed and how parents disclose to their children. However, relatively...

Objective To explore the lived experiences of shared children in stepfamilies (i.e., those born into a repartnered family who live with married parents and older half‐siblings). Background Shared children have been found to fare worse than other sibling groups on a variety of outcomes (e.g., educational outcomes, antisocial behavior, depressive sy...

In this chapter, we address the practices of family life education in the context of Saudi Arabia. We start by providing an overview of the Saudi social context, including the important historical and economic events that shaped the country and the influence of sociohistorical events on family dynamics. Then, we consider current Saudi family demogr...

Many children experience multiple family transitions as their parents move into and out of romantic relationships. The instability hypothesis is a stress mediation model that suggests that family transitions cause stress and that this stress leads to worse developmental outcomes. We conducted a systematic review to evaluate the evidence base for th...

(No abstract, see first paragraph): Attitudes about divorce range on a continuum from seeing divorce as the shattering of a family, and the cause of most social ills (Friedman & Martin, 2011) to seeing divorce as a stressful but normative life transition (Amato, 2004; Eickmeyer, 2015). Prior to 1960, divorce was viewed as a social problem, but betw...

Objective To examine individuals' attitudes about parental disclosures to children. Background Parents' disclosures can either help or hinder children's coping with family‐related stressors. Knowing what is appropriate to disclose, however, is not always clear. Method We examined judgments about parental disclosures using a mixed‐methods approach...

Purpose Stepgrandparents are becoming more common, and they can, and often do, provide affective and instrumental support to families. Little is known, however, about how they negotiate and enact their roles within families, especially with stepgrandchildren. Stepgrandmothers warrant special attention because researchers have found that women exper...

In this mixed methods study, we explored how gender of an aggressor and the levels of aggression (i.e., yelling, throwing a drink, slapping, and punching) influenced attitudes about (a) public displays of intimate partner violence (IPV) and (b) bystander intervention. A feminist-informed, social constructionist perspective guided the study. Partici...

Due to rising rates of non-marital birth in the United States, unmarried families have been the subject of extensive research and the target of government funded interventions over the last 15 years. Despite a growing literature on this population, few studies have addressed how unmarried couples coparent in the context of poverty. In the present s...

Background Medication reconciliation is a safety practice to identify medication order discrepancies when patients’ transitions between settings. In nursing homes, registered nurses (RNs) and licensed practical nurses (LPNs), each group with different education preparation and scope of practice responsibilities, perform medication reconciliation. H...

en Historically, there have always been stepfamilies, but until the early 1970s, they remained largely unnoticed by social scientists. Research interest in stepfamilies followed shortly after divorce became the primary precursor to stepfamily formation. Because stepfamilies are structurally diverse and much more complex than nuclear families, they...

Using vignettes as a data collection tool, the main purpose of this randomized, mixed-method study was to examine U.S. emerging adults’ (N = 451) expectations and preferences for five different gender role relationship (GRR) types: (a) male-head/female-complement, (b) male-senior/female-junior partner, (c) partner-equal, (d) female-senior/male-juni...

How do practitioners work with stepfamilies? Stepfamily education programs are presented along with a brief discussion of what is taught. Materials on the WWW, self-help materials, self-help groups, and bibliotherapy are briefly discussed. Topics presented in the chapter include: affinity strategies, learning co-parenting skills, obtaining financia...

How do same-sex stepfamilies compare to heterosexual stepfamilies? How are they similar and how do they differ? In this chapter stepfamilies headed by gay and lesbian couples are examined. There are multiple pathways to creating a same-sex stepfamily (i.e., after a divorce, via donor insemination, hiring a surrogate to deliver, adopting); these pat...

How do couples build a close bond when they have children from prior relationships and ex-partners who are interested observers of these bonding processes? In this chapter we examine the roles of children, former spouses and partners, and others on the bonding processes in stepfamily couples. Research on couple dynamics related to power and equity,...

How do stepparents develop close relationships with stepchildren? How do they maintain those relationships over time? Stepparenting is often a challenge. In this chapter we discuss the diverse contexts within which stepparents develop and maintain bonds with stepchildren. The somewhat different circumstances of residential and nonresidential stepmo...

Are intergenerational bonds important in stepfamilies? Changes in longevity, fertility, and marital stability have important implications for stepfamilies. The effects of custody and gender on grandparent–grandchild relationships in stepfamilies are presented in this chapter, as is information about stepgrandparents (39 % of American families have...

How do clinicians view stepfamilies? The history of clinician’s perspectives is presented beginning with early attempts (first wave) to shape stepfamilies as nuclear families. The second wave of stepfamily clinicians proposed developmental modes that were more flexible and create, moving beyond reconstituting the nuclear family. A third wave of cli...

How are parent–child relationships maintained during stepfamily formation, what changes in those relationships occur over time, and what influences these changes? The primary focus of the chapter is a review and critique of research with mothers in stepfamily households. Role functions of mothers (i.e., protector of children, gatekeeper, defender,...

What is the nature of sibling, stepsibling, and half-sibling relationships in stepfamilies? Data on the presence of stepsiblings and half-siblings in stepfamilies is difficult to acquire but estimates are that nearly 15 % of all children live with a half-or stepsibling, and over 12 % live in complex stepfamilies in which they have both half- and st...

How are children affected by living in stepfamilies? We compare family structures on academic achievement, internalizing and externalizing behaviors, and interpersonal relationships in this chapter. Theoretical explanations for stepfamily effects are reviewed. In general, stepchildren do less well than children in first-marriage nuclear families, b...

What are the research trends and future challenges in studying stepfamilies? Over the past few years, among researchers there is greater sophistication in research designs, a better understanding of stepfamily complexity, more theorizing and theory-building, and greater awareness of how beliefs and values affect stepfamily scholarship. Challenges t...

How do stepfamily couples find each other? What is dating like for parents? In this chapter we examine who gets remarried and who does not, who cohabits with stepchildren and who does not, the motivations to remarry or repartner, the barriers to remarriage or repartnering, and courtship differences between first marriages and remarriages. We then e...

How do cultural values and norms affect stepfamilies? Stepfamilies do not live in a cultural vacuum. Cultural values affect stepfamily members. How practitioners and researchers think about stepfamilies also is affected by cultural beliefs and norms. Stepfamilies are incomplete institutions; in this chapter we examine what that means, and we explor...

How have stepfamilies and stepfamily scholarship changed over time? Stepfamilies are an international phenomenon. Historically, there have always been stepfamilies, but until about 50 years ago, they were formed primarily after death of a spouse/parent, and so went largely unnoticed by social scientists. Stepfamilies were discovered by scholars whe...

Why do various pathways to stepfamily formation matter? Stepfamilies are formed in many ways—after death, after divorce, after cohabitations, when lone, never-married parents repartner. The pathways to stepfamily living matter because they are important contexts within which stepfamily relationships are created, developed, and maintained. In this c...

This second edition synthesizes the emerging knowledge base on the diversity of stepfamilies, their inherent concerns, and why so relatively little is still known about them. Its extensive findings shed needed light on family arrangements relatively new to the literature (e.g., cohabitating stepparents), the effects of these relationships on differ...

This article details the process of a grounded theory investigation into divorced parents care for children with a chronic illness. It describes how the researchers developed their initial research question, designed a study to answer that question, analyzed and interpreted their results, and ultimately published their findings. This article also e...

Father–child relationships tend to decrease in quality and closeness following parental divorce, yet little is known about how these relationships evolve in response to normative developmental changes in children. We conducted a grounded theory study of how 33 emerging adults maintained or changed their relationships with their nonresidential fathe...

Child support payments are intended to improve children's wellbeing by securing financial support from noncustodial parents. Payments in arrear are a significant problem, however, particularly when parents live in different states. Using a mixed-methods design, we compared the effectiveness of a private collection agency to a state agency managing...

Purpose - Stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationships are increasingly common as a result of relatively high rates of divorce and remarriage and increased longevity. When relationships are close, stepgrandparents may be valuable resources for stepgrandchildren, but the relational processes salient to the development of these ties remain largely un...

Using data from 291 divorced mothers and fathers, we compared their perceptions of how much legal-financial, time-logistics, and parental fitness barriers influenced their postdivorce coparenting, and we tested the associations between these barriers to postdivorce coparenting and self-reported coparenting behaviors. Men perceived greater legal-fin...

Divorced parents face distinct challenges in providing care for chronically ill children. Children’s residence in two households necessitates the development of family-specific strategies to ensure coparents’ supervision of regimen adherence and the management of children’s health care. Utilizing a risk and resilience perspective, a grounded theory...

Following parental separation, child custody decisions determine the legal responsibilities of each parent to the child or children. The increase in parental separation in the United States since the second half of the twentieth century for reasons other than death has lead to greater visibility of child custody decisions. There are two types of ch...

Families have become increasingly diverse and complex, which has made defining family membership more ambiguous. Issues surrounding family identity, belonging, and shared kinship are relevant in many types of complex families, but they are critically important for stepfamilies. In this study the authors examined stepgrandchild–stepgrandparent relat...

Decades of divorce and remarriage, coupled with increases in longevity, have resulted in large numbers of multigenerational stepfamilies in many societies worldwide. Stepgrandparents are more common in families in the early twenty-first century than ever before; thus, researchers, clinicians, and educators are eager to better understand stepgrandpa...

Stepparenting occurs when adults marry or cohabit with a partner who has a child or children from a previous relationship or relationships. Many adults become stepparents after having experienced multiple marital or relational transitions (e.g., marriage, divorce, cohabitation) and their stepchildren also may have had multiple family transitions. S...

The process of becoming happily remarried requires navigating a series of relationships, transitions, and difficulties that differ from the challenges confronted in first-marriage couple formation. Though there is limited research on repartnering dynamics, researchers and clinicians have uncovered some clues about adaptive strategies for remarried...

Using data from 280 divorced or separated parents, we provide initial evidence of the psychometric properties and validity of the Experiences with Coparenting Scale (ECS), an 11-item semantic differential measure of divorced parents’ satisfaction with their coparenting relationships. The ECS consisted of a single factor with high internal reliabili...

Stepfamilies are common throughout the industrialized world. In the United States nearly everyone marries, and about half of the marriages include at least one previously married partner (US Census Bureau, 2000). Most divorced people in other western countries also either remarry or cohabit, but at lower rates than in the United States. About half...

Stepmothers are women who marry or cohabit with partners who have children from prior unions. This broad definition of stepmothers includes women from a variety of roles and who live in diverse family constellations – those who have children of their own as well as women that are childless or childfree, women in lesbian relationships, and it includ...

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of relationship status (i.e., cohabiting or married), gender, and parental status on perceptions about intimate partner obligations. In vignettes depicting various aspects of couple relationships, we measured the effects of relationship status, gender, and parental status on partner obligations,...

Children in diverse families often have divergent life courses from children reared in other family forms. Diverse families, unlike first-marriage nuclear families, often are not formed by marriage, and when they are, the marriage may not be the first for at least one of the adults. Children in diverse families may be genetically related to only on...

When divorced parents remarry or cohabit with new partners, it is challenging to maintain functional postdivorce coparenting systems. In this grounded theory study of 19 divorced mothers, we examined the processes by which they maintained boundaries around coparental relationships after 1 or both coparents had repartnered. Mothers saw themselves as...

Remarriages end in divorce more often than first marriages, so many stepchildren experience multiple parental divorces and the potential loss of significant family ties. Although there is substantial research on parent–child relationships after divorce, little is known about stepparent–stepchild relationships after divorce. Therefore, the authors c...

PurposeOlder adults and their families, geriatricians and gerontological practitioners, other health care providers, and social policy makers are invested in finding ways to prevent health and safety problems so that older adults can remain in their homes safely and independently. Family life education and problem-prevention programs designed for o...

The authors performed a cluster analysis on data from 270 divorced or separated parents to classify their perceived coparental relationship with their ex-spouse and test if parents' perceptions of their children's postdivorce adjustment differed based on their perceptions of their postdivorce coparental relationship. The cluster analysis resulted i...

Court-ordered shared physical and legal custody has led to greater numbers of couples that must coparent following divorce. We conducted a grounded theory study to examine resilience processes in postdivorce coparenting. Data were collected through in-depth interviews from 47 divorced mothers and fathers. The analysis revealed that successfully tra...

Qualitative approaches are excellent ways to investigate family dynamics and family relationships. In the present study, we identify four goals in which qualitative methods benefit researchers: (1) obtaining family members’ meanings about family interactions and relationships; (2) acquiring family insiders’ views about relational processes and obse...

Beliefs about intergenerational obligations to assist older adults are known to be influenced by contextual variables such as the type of kin relationship (i.e., stepparent, parent) between older and younger adults. One contextual variable that has not been studied is the degree to which older individuals are seen as culpable for their problems. If...

Older adults who live alone are at risk for problems (e.g., falling, sudden illness). To maintain themselves safely at home they may benefit from planning to prevent problems. The purpose of this study was to evaluate an intervention designed to train family members or friends as to how to help older adults who were living alone make plans to maint...

During a longitudinal study of the experience of reaching help quickly, 34 homebound women (ages 85 to 97) who lived alone reported 106 reach-help-quickly incidents (RHQIs). The purpose of this study was to expand knowledge about RHQIs and intentions relative to them and to compare those facets of experience for subscribers to a personal emergency...

Suggests how teachers and schools should treat children and their stepfamilies, illustrating the positive aspects of stepfamily living and listing classroom materials representing stepfamily lifestyles. (CI)

Stepfamilies are common in the United States. An estimated 40–50 % of marriages are a remarriage for one or both partners (Cherlin, 2010), and although not all of these remarriages result in the formation of a stepfamily, a significant portion of them do. According to a recent study, 42 % of a national sample of US adults and more than half (52 %)...

Divorced individuals who share parenting responsibilities have to figure out ways to work together to raise their children. The purpose of this qualitative study of 49 divorced coparents was to examine how they used technology (e.g., cell phones, computers) to communicate. For parents in effective coparenting relationships, communication technologi...

Demographic TrendsTypes of Intergenerational Step RelationshipsResearch on Step-Grandparents and Step-GrandchildrenGrandparents and Grandchildren in StepfamiliesRelationships Among Adult Stepchildren and Older StepparentsConclusion

Divorced individuals who share parenting responsibilities have to figure out ways to work together to raise their children. The purpose of this qualitative study of 49 divorced coparents was to examine how they used technology (e.g., cell phones, computers) to communicate. For parents in effective coparenting relationships, communication technologi...

The professional literature richly documents the importance for children to maintain emotional bonds with non-residential parents after separation/divorce, yet parents often struggle mightily with continuing care as co-parents. This chapter examines research on the role of “gatekeeping” by one parent, affecting the ability of the other parent to ma...

This comprehensive, state-of-the-art textbook and reference volume in family gerontology reviews and critiques the recent theoretical, empirical, and methodological literature; identifies future research directions; and makes recommendations for gerontology professionals. This book is both an updated version of and a complement to the original Hand...

The purposes of this longitudinal phenomenological study were to describe intentions of older women relative to reaching help quickly (RHQ), to place those intentions in personal-social context, and to compare intentions of subscribers to a personal emergency response system (PERS) and nonsubscribers. The 40 participants were aged 85 or older, resi...

This article reviews family nursing research published from 1996 to 2011. This is a follow-up to a review published in the Journal of Family Nursing in 1995. Findings from the first review are compared with this one, trends in family nursing scholarship are identified, and predictions and suggestions for future directions are offered. The latest ge...

Health care services are typically viewed as institutions or agencies offering professional care or care supervised by professionals. The concept of availability of health care services involves the degree to which persons can readily find professional care. Few scholars have considered the relevance of these notions to life-circumstances of older...

Rapid and widespread changes in relationship formation and dissolution over the past 50 years have revealed new patterns in romantic and sexual relationships, particularly among emerging adults. In this study, grounded theory methods were used to investigate the role of one such pattern, stayovers, in the development of romantic relationships among...

Despite growing numbers of singles, the idealization of marriage and child rearing remains strong, pervasive, and largely unquestioned. Guided by life course perspective, the purpose of this article was to examine familial and societal messages women receive when not married by their late 20s to mid-30s. Using descriptive phenomenological method, t...

Thirty-two stepdaughters and 17 stepsons participated in this grounded theory study of emerging adult stepchildren's perceptions about how relationships with their stepparents developed. The theory created from this study proposes that the degree to which stepchildren engage in relationship-building and -maintaining behaviors with stepparents is a...

This is an obituary on the life of developmental psychologist, Lawrence A. Kurdek. He was a leader in the study of child and adult relationships, died on June 11, 2009. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).

The childhood cancer experiences of stepfamilies have not been described despite the fact that nearly one third of U.S. children will live in a stepfamily household. To describe the impact of diagnosis on parental relationships in stepfamilies, we undertook a secondary analysis of data from a study of parental decision making in structurally divers...

The purpose of this study was to examine attitudes and beliefs that predicted frequency of coparental communication and intentions to coparent for 203 divorced mothers and 124 fathers. Mothers and fathers who held positive perceptions of coparenting communicated more often with their former partner than did other parents. Mothers who perceived soci...

Few researchers have studied how parents from diverse family structures cope with childhood chronic illness. We designed this study to discern the childhood cancer treatment decision-making (TDM) process in these families. Using grounded theory, we interviewed 15 custodial parents, nonresidential parents, and stepparents who had previously made a m...

This chapter examines research and clinical writing on intergenerational relations in stepfamilies. It draws on over twenty-four studies conducted in the US about intergenerational responsibilities following divorce and remarriage, and illustrates the various ways in which reciprocity is perceived in post-divorce stepfamilies as well as other facto...

Introduction The rising costs of healthcare and other social welfare programmes and the efforts of the federal, state and local governments to reduce services that are provided by governmental agencies have increased the importance of distinguishing personal and familial responsibilities from public (that is, governmental) obligations to dependent...

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of patterns of resource exchange on beliefs about intergenerational responsibilities in older parent—adult child relationships. The effects of adult children's resources and later-life remarriage on beliefs about intergenerational responsibilities also were examined. A national sample of 1025 adu...

Parent education in the 1980's must address such issues as the prosumer movement, cost efficiency, prevention rather than remediation, program availability, and evaluation. Parent-Child Interactions, a model designed to instruct parents to teach their preschool children basic cognitive and perceptual skills, is responsive to these current issues an...

We assessed beliefs about adult children’s responsibilities to financially assist parents and stepparents following later-life divorce and remarriage using a multiple-segment factorial vignette with a national sample (N = 1,121). Ordered logistic regression analyses indicated that beliefs about financial responsibilities to older adults declined af...

The aims of this study were: (a) to examine general perceptions of filial obligations toward sharing housing with older parents and stepparents; and (b) to assess the effects of selected contextual factors on those normative beliefs. A national sample of 579 men and 582 women (mean age = 44.6, SD = 17.2) responded to a multiple segment factorial vi...

The purpose of this study was to assess how acculturation may influence the beliefs that Latinos hold about adult children's obligations to assist older parents and stepparents. Beliefs about intergenerational assistance were obtained from 195 Latinas and 167 Latinos from a randomly selected national sample using six vignettes that described situat...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relations between divorced mothers’ (N= 196) coparental role identity and their perceptions of how cooperatively they coparent. Data were gathered by questionnaires mailed to mothers who had participated in a court-mandated divorce education program. Using structural equation modeling, it was determi...

Given the increasing trend of women delaying (or forgoing) marriage and the minimal scholarship on women’s reflections of their life course trajectories, the purpose of the study was to examine the lived experience of White, college-educated women aged 28 – 34 years who have not married. Using descriptive phenomenology methodology, 32 interviews we...

Stepfamilies are common throughout the industrialized world. In the US nearly everyone marries, and about half of the marriages include at least one previously married partner (US Census Bureau 2000). Most divorced people in other western countries also either remarry or cohabit, but at lower rates than in the US. About half of the remarriages invo...

Stepmothers are women who marry or cohabit with partners who have children from prior unions. This broad definition of stepmothers includes women from a variety of roles and who live in diverse family constellations – those who have children of their own as well as women that are childless or childfree, women in lesbian relationships, and it includ...

The purpose of this investigation is to examine differences in the experiences of mothers of children with cystic fibrosis who are in diverse family structures (first-marriage families, stepfamily households, single-parent households). In particular, mothers' perceptions of children's health, adherence to prescribed treatments, and help received fr...

We examined beliefs about intergenerational responsibilities to assist older kin with a national sample of 362 Latinos, 492 African Americans, 121 Asian Americans, and 2,122 White European Americans using multiple-segment factorial vignettes. More similarities than differences existed between ethnic groups, but Asian Americans and African Americans...

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of reciprocal and nonreciprocal patterns of exchange on beliefs about intergenerational responsibilities in parent–child and stepparent–stepchild relationships. A national sample of 1044 adults responded to a multiple segment factorial survey. Normative responsibilities to assist kin were greater...

This grounded theory study examined the processes by which women make custody decisions and manage co-parenting after divorce with abusive former husbands. Nineteen women who left abusive husbands were interviewed. Fears, pragmatic concerns, and family ideology pushed them toward custody agreements that continued their involvement with former husba...