Embracing an era of rising family quality of life research

Inquiry into family life has been an intriguing topic for multiple disciplines for many decades. The field of disability has especially witnessed a growing interest of research in understanding the needs of families of individuals with disabilities and the means of supporting them to attain enhanced quality of life. Rooted in a rich literature of individual quality of life research, family quality of life (FQoL) has emerged as a field of study since the dawn of 21st century (Turnbull et al. 2004; Brown et al. 2009; Wang & Brown 2009). From its early stage of development, fundamental issues surrounding conceptualisation, measurement and applications of family quality of life have been considered and debated. Over the years, FQoL research has been burgeoning in all these three dimensions. Despite the pluralism of FQoL definitions, there is a growing consensus on the underlying principles of conceptualising family quality of life. Zuna et al. (2010, p. 262) put forth a definition that sheds light on such an emerging consensus: ‘Family quality of life is a dynamic sense of wellbeing of the family, collectively and subjectively defined and informed by its members, in which individual and family-level needs interact.’ However, they have made a call to the field for further theorising about family quality of life. In addition, numerous measures of family quality of life have been developed in different cultures and languages and tested for validity and reliability. These measures assess family needs or family outcomes for the purpose of service programme planning or evaluation. They do this via the collection of either qualitative or quantitative data, or both. The fruitful applications of FQoL concepts, propositions and measures in developmental disability service system, which have led to a paradigm shift of service models, suggest that we are embracing an era of rising research in understanding family quality of life so as to better support families of individuals with disabilities through service systems that are family-centred. Against this background, we believe that JIDR has, without doubt, chosen a perfect time to dedicate a special issue on the topic of family quality of life. We, as guest editors, are absolutely honoured to be invited to co-edit this special issue, and are thrilled to be able to glean a wonderful collection of 16 articles in this special issue. This special issue has several unique features. First of all, it’s truly international. The 16 articles in this issue represent the most current FQoL empirical research from scholars from a wide spread regions of the world. From Asia, the article by Hu, Wang and Xiao presents the results of an extensive survey of 442 Chinese families of middle school or high school students with intellectual disabilities (ID). The 1 We acknowledge the different abbreviations for Family Quality of Life used in the literature: FQOL in the US literature and FQoL used in the international literature. We have used FQoL given the international focus of the Journal of Intellectual Disability Research. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2788.2011.01509.x