Multicultural Family Studies: Educating Students for Diversity.

The article presents a survey of educators of comparative family studies and identifies the types of information that are needed for multicultural family courses. Issues related to social inequality were considered particularly important. Family educators are expected to be interested in current global changes and their impacts on contemporary families. Family scholars have made significant contributions to the study of cultural diversity internationally and nationally, through comparative studies of families in other cultures and studies of minority groups in the U.S. Traditionally, comparative family research involves the systematic observations of two or more family systems across time or place. The goal is to identify and to explain the uniformities and differences in family structure and the effects of these characteristics on individual and family development and interactions. Virtually every topic studied by family scholars can be and is pursued comparatively, such as premarital sexuality, conjugal power, marital dissolution, differential socialization of children, and gender roles in households and the wage labor market.