About Family Sciences

Aims

Family Sciences (ISSN 3042-6693) is an open access, peer-reviewed, international, and interdisciplinary journal that publishes innovative research, theory, and practice-oriented scholarship on families and family life across global, structural, technological, and sociocultural contexts. Family Sciences is committed to integrating rigorous empirical inquiry, robust theoretical development, and thoughtful translational application. It focuses on publishing regular research papers, reviews, and communications, but other article types will be considered. The full research methods must be provided so that the results can be reproduced and that there is no minimum word limit.

Scope

Family Sciences welcomes manuscripts on all topics related to family, including formation, expansion, and contraction across historical, social, and developmental time; the allocation of limited resources to meet needs and wants (family economics); and all aspects of familial interactions ranging from parenting and ritual formation/maintenance to parent–child interaction and partner violence, child abuse, and neglect.

Furthermore, Family Sciences encourages submissions of manuscripts on non-Western and Global South family experiences. Underrepresented topics include extended and multigenerational households, fictive kinship, communal caregiving, and transnational family dynamics shaped by labor migration. Family forms defined by religion, customary law, or moral obligation—such as polygynous unions, social parenthood, or informal marriages—and associated practices (e.g., arranged marriage, bride price) are frequently overlooked or mischaracterized. Additionally, the literature rarely addresses the structural impacts of familial displacement from war, genocide, and political unrest, and related topics of subsistence livelihoods or environmental interdependence.

Methodological Openness

Family Sciences is methodologically inclusive, valuing the following methods:

• Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods;
• Arts-based and visual methodologies;
• Longitudinal, life course, and multilevel designs;
• Action-oriented and critical participatory research;
• Big data, ethnography, and digital research tools.

MDPI Publication Ethics Statement

MDPI is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). MDPI takes the responsibility to enforce a rigorous peer-review together with strict ethical policies and standards to ensure to add high quality scientific works to the field of scholarly publication. Unfortunately, cases of plagiarism, data falsification, inappropriate authorship credit, and the like, do arise. MDPI takes such publishing ethics issues very seriously and our editors are trained to proceed in such cases with a zero tolerance policy. To verify the originality of content submitted to our journals, we use iThenticate to check submissions against previous publications.

Book Reviews

Authors and publishers are encouraged to send review copies of their recent related books to the following address. Received books will be listed as Books Received within the journal's News & Announcements section.

MDPI
Grosspeteranlage 5
CH-4052 Basel
Switzerland

Copyright / Open Access

Articles published in Family Sciences will be Open-Access articles distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The copyright is retained by the author(s). MDPI will insert the following note at the end of the published text:

Reprints

Reprints may be ordered. Please contact publisher@mdpi.com for more information on how to order reprints.

Announcement and Advertisement

Announcements regarding academic activities such as conferences are published for free in the News & Announcements section of the journal. Advertisement can be either published or placed on the pertinent website. Contact e-mail address is famsci@mdpi.com.

Editorial Office

For further MDPI contacts, see here.