Explanatory Practice in Family Studies

This article makes a case for a more flexible and realistic explanatory practice in the family field. It discusses current descriptive, conceptual, and theoretical approaches. Furthermore, attention is paid to the phenomenon of explanation itself, to its predictive power and to the logical context of its questions and answers. In addition to the use of selected sources from the realm of family studies, the presentation adopts ideas from the domains of the philosophy of science, mathematics, and related social sciences.