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Relational developmental systems (RDS), a metatheory grounded in the relationism worldview, is becoming more widely accepted in developmental science. Its principles define a perspective that is relational, systemic, holistic, dynamic, and process oriented. Even though child and family development was the topic of the initial formulation of RDS nearly 40 years ago, its application in successive years has remained largely within human development. Here, I consider the applicability of this metatheory to family science. My consideration includes a summary of RDS principles; a description of RDS‐compatible qualitative research in a range of family science topic areas; a discussion of the usefulness of RDS in enhancing coherence among metatheory, methodology, theory, and methods; and conclusions about its potential fit with family science.

A relational approach is proposed which provides a framework for connecting levels of analysis/phenomena relevant to narrative identity. Because it is grounded in a systemic relational metanarrative, the relational approach does not preference any one level. Small story and big story are both viewed as integral to the larger identity project. A third analytic level, the middle story, is suggested as a bridge between small and big story. As one example of the approach, systemic analyses of narrative stability for two university students are presented, based on interviews conducted over four years. These analyses conceptually connect middle-level processes with big stories and illustrate principles of circular causality. The final portion of the paper discusses implications and requirements of the relational approach, and other ways that it might be applied.

This research examined the linkages between congruence in perceptions of family functioning and adolescent competencies with a sample of 223 first‐year college students, their mothers, and their fathers. The primary goal was to explore further the nature and importance of perceptual congruence as related to adolescent social competencies with a more informative analytic strategy than has been used in most past research (one that controls for individual perceptions of family members and takes into account direction of differences among family members), and with more comprehensive, multimethod assessments of adolescent competencies. Our congruence analyses portrayed a more complex picture of congruence and divergence than has emerged from previous studies, and highlight the importance of examining interaction patterns in future research. It is noteworthy, however, that individual perceptions of family members were more important than was congruence in relation to adolescent social competencies. The possibility that congruence effects may be more apparent when the focus is on more specific rather than global measures and on developmental as well as family interaction processes is suggested.

Research on women's preponderance among animal rights advocates explains it exclusively as a product of women's socialization, emphasizing a relational orientation of care and nurturing that extends to animals. The authors propose a more structural explanation: Women's experiences with structural oppression make them more disposed to egalitarian ideology, which creates concern for animal rights. Using data from a 1993 national sample, the authors find that an egalitarian gender ideology is a key difference in women's and men's routes to animal rights advocacy: It differentiates those more likely to endorse animal rights among women but not among men. Neither this ideology nor other variables in the analysis, however, account for women's greater overall support of animal rights in the combined sample. Reasons for this latter finding are explored.

Contemporary research on parent–adolescent decision making has been concerned with decision outcomes and has viewed these outcomes as indicators of adolescent autonomy. We offer an alternative, dialogical perspective, which directs attention to how adolescents and parents co-construct a decision. The analysis is based on parent and daughter narrations of an important school choice—the decision to apply to a new college-preparatory middle school for girls. By highlighting the decision process in three families, we illustrate how co-construction of a decision can differ even among families who would be classified in the same way on the commonly used outcome assessment. We also question the concept of adolescent decision-making "autonomy" in that it has fostered a disregard for the rich dialogical context of all decision making.

Well documented though they may be, the linkages between religiosity and risk behaviors such as substance use are not well understood. Arousal theory contends that these linkages are due to selective factors in religious participation rather than to religious influences: those most likely to engage in risk behaviors—sensation seekers—are less likely to have church affiliations. Issues addressed in this research were: (a) the importance of sensation seeking, and the interaction of sensation seeking and religiosity, in explaining the relationships between religiosity and the use of both legal and illegal substances; and (b) the variations in these relationships as a function of denominational and gender contexts. Employing a sample of 526 college student respondents, we found no support for arousal theory predictions nor for moderating effects of denominational and gender contexts. Religiosity, sensation seeking, denominational affiliation, and gender were relatively independent predictors of substance use, with their importance varying dependent upon type of substance and specific indicator of use (amount versus grade of first use).