| Summary: | This article shares the research needs of a family life educator and marriage counselor. Despite the fact that overall there is an acute shortage of scientific knowledge about family life, some areas have been so heavily researched that energies might be shifted from them to untrodden areas. The topics that are heavily researched are premarital sex, marital sex and extramarital sex, mixed marriages, class differences in family behavior, age at marriage, the wife's employment, kinship, family power structure, family planning, parenthood as crisis, child-rearing methods and the personality structure of children, family life cycle and divorce. The popularity of sexual studies also strikes as being due to their emotional attractiveness. Besides the fact that the sexual drives involve one of the most dynamic mobilizations of energies makes sexual research intriguing and gratifying as a professional activity. There are two major research strategies, one is to start with independent variables such as marital homogamy or sexual exclusivity and to pay special attention to the deviant cases whose marriages thrive in spite of the way they violate the general rule. A second research strategy would be to start with the dependent variable of marital success and pay special attention to the top quartile or perhaps especially to the top decile.
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