Family/Household Well-Being and Individual Development

Dear Colleagues,

The family is the basic unit of society. It is primarily responsible for teaching and modelling health and creating wellness-promoting settings and practices. Investments in research on family well-being and individual development are vital to our communities and our children's health and development.

There are several facets of family well-being. This Special Issue calls for research that advances and fills the gaps in our understanding of family well-being and individual development, providing meaningful insights for research, practice, and policy.

Families are complex, with various definitions and configurations. This Special Issue uses a broad definition of the family that includes not only "a group of two people or more (one of whom is the householder) related by birth, marriage, or adoption and residing together", but also households comprised of relationships and interactions with biological and/or non-biological relatives.

• Submissions may include articles, conceptual papers, or reviews on new or emerging ideas on advancing family/household well-being and individual development throughout the life course through evidence-informed practices.
• Strong preference for papers that are original, interdisciplinary, and innovative that focus on or that will lead to family/household-level interventions (focus on the family/household as a unit).
• Submissions need to clearly articulate the implications and/or translation of findings into health-promoting settings and practices and/or lead to a specific call to action.

Topics may include any of the following:

1. Social determinants of family/household well-being, resilience, and self-efficacy:

• Promoting positive childhood experiences and strengthening families/households across the life course;
• Intergenerational health and protective and risk factors to child, youth, and parent well-being;
• Family health and resilience to stress and/or adverse circumstances (COVID-19, ACEs, mental health issues, domestic violence, substance use disorder, poverty, and homelessness);
• Caring for a multigenerational household, including aging parents, and its impact on family/household functioning, structure, routines, relationships, economic security, housing, safety, environment, skills, learning, and identity and sense of belonging.

2. Measurements of family/household well-being:

• Individual and/or composite measures of family well-being;
• Assessing health equity and its impact on family/household well-being.

3. Family-centered policies and services:

• Family-centered work policies and work-family balance/conflict among caregiving employees;
• Policies directed at the fundamental causes of health inequality and their impact on family/household well-being;
• Trends, approaches, and/or best practices in family-friendly work policies using established approaches to research synthesis (e.g., integrative, meta-analysis, meta-synthesis, mixed methods, scoping, and systematic reviews).

4. Family-centered public health and healthcare:

• Defining the role of families/households in public health and healthcare;
• Intersections in family/household well-being, public health, and healthcare in the equitable access to health and delivery of healthcare services, particularly among marginalized and at-risk families and communities;
• Intersectoral collaborations and culturally-informed interventions in addressing family needs and well-being.

(*Contributions have to follow one of the three categories of papers (article, conceptual paper or review) of the journal and address the topic of the Special Issue.)

Dr. Len Novilla
Prof. Dr. Michael Barnes
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as conceptual papers are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Societies is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• health and well-being
• family health and well-being
• family
• household
• family-focused
• family-centered
• family-friendly
• family education
• family-based intervention
• family and resilience
• policy
• child and youth policy
• family and workplace policy
• family and health policy
• family and public health
• family and health
• evidence-informed practice
• interdisciplinary
• intersectoral
• life course
• social determinants of health
• children’s health
• child well-being
• child development
• adolescent development
• adverse childhood experience
• multigeneration families
• intergenerational health