Family studies of schizophrenia: an update and commentary

Recent family studies of schizophrenia which address the question of etiology are reviewed. The majority of these studies continue to focus on two major aspects of family life, deviant role relationships and disordered communication processes among family members. By and large the research on role relationships has not gone beyond demonstrating that correlations exist between these family variables and the occurrence of schizophrenia in an offspring. By contrast, recent research on disordered communication has begun to employ methodologies appropriate to testing the direction of the relationship between these family interaction patterns and schizophrenia. On a limited scale, some investigators have also begun to consider the etiologic role of family communication variables within more complex causal models, incorporating factors outside the domain of family interaction. To date greatest attention has been given to the combined role of genetic and family interaction variables. The need for multivariate and longitudinal approaches which examine the moderating effects of the social context of the family on relations between family variables and schizophrenia is discussed.