Family quality of life in intellectual and developmental disabilities: A supportbased framework to enhance quality of life in other families

Within the intellectual and developmental disability field, the study of family quality of life in the past two decades has made strong and significant advances in understanding the conceptual, theoretical, and measurement aspects of family quality of life as a construct. Family quality of life still remains an understudied area across many other family disciplines. Many service organizations that are charged with responding to family issues often do not consider utilizing a quality of life framework to guide service provision, and if they do, they often do not follow-up with quality of life assessments to evaluate if their services had a positive impact on the families. Secondly, we feel it is critically important to examine how the integration of family support and family quality of life can work in concert to improve family outcomes. In this chapter, we present a family quality of life support-based framework that intersects quality of life with family support factors and incorporates family voice from the onset to the final evaluation of family quality of life. Finally, we illustrate how our framework has utility across a variety of family issues that may prove useful to other family-related disciplines.