Preface

As a licensed marriage and family therapist, I have spent many years studying, evaluating, and helping families. Over time, I have begun to see patterns in families and among different populations of clientele that have made me keenly aware of processes of interaction among those who sit across from me in my office. Working with families, as opposed to just studying about them, allows one to gain insights that perhaps only clergy or other professional counselors understand. It is some of these insights that have been gleaned only through both research and experience that I hope to illuminate in this study.

For marriage and family therapists, understanding family functioning is fundamentally important. It is critical for therapists to be able to assess the level of functioning within the family and determine if their interaction is healthy or unhealthy. Counselors are able to determine the level of family functioning through their experience and through extensive research that indicates what qualities are common among successful marriages and families. As a result of this research, several paradigms, or models, have been developed to facilitate family assessment. The idea for my project grew out of the premise that it would be insightful to take constructs developed from these well-researched paradigms of viewing families—paradigms that are the best tools available to us today—and apply those standards in evaluating a historical family.

There are obvious limitations to this kind of approach. The advantages therapists have with a live family in front of them include being able to ask specific questions to ^[1] elicit important information, viewing family interaction as it takes place, and giving family members questionnaires or other assessment tools that facilitate the evaluation of family functioning. However, some of the constructs developed from the different paradigms of evaluating families, such as the level of communication skills or the emotional exchange between family members, would be difficult to ascertain in the historical record.

Even with these limitations, however, there are many constructs that can be successfully evaluated within historical records. For example, constructs such as cohesion and adaptability are two well-researched concepts that could be evaluated in a historical family. Other constructs may or may not be evaluated depending on the extensiveness of the historical records. The Joseph Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith family is a good candidate for this type of study as there exists extensive historical information that can facilitate such an analysis.

As a marriage and family therapist and as a historian, I have a limited selection of historical material specifically related to five common family processes. The five family process concepts have been extracted from the major paradigms of evaluating families in the field of marriage and family therapy. It is hypothesized that this approach in evaluating the Smith family will yield important insights into family functioning and interaction among family members previously concealed within the historical records. ^[2]

[Editor’s note: For more information on Smith family members, see Kyle R. Walker, United by Faith: The Joseph Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith Family (American Fork, Utah: Covenant Communications, 2005).]