Introduction to the special issue on strengths-based examinations of Latinx youths’ interpersonal relationships and socioemotional well-being

Abstract

U.S. and international Latinx populations remain underrepresented within the literature, despite national reports indicating that Latinx individuals comprise a rapidly growing proportion of the U.S. population (Roberts et al., 2020), and represent 8.2% of the world population (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 2023). In this paper we use the term Latinx -rather than Latino, Latina, Latina/o, Latin@, Latin, Latine, or Latin American-as this term allows people to ask questions about gender, language, and inclusion, (Milian, 2017;Torres, 2018), while acknowledging that it remains an imperfect term that upholds settler colonial ideals (Urrieta & Calderón, 2019). The underrepresentation of the Latinx population in family science is surprising given research that documents the salience of interpersonal and familial relationships to the Latinx population in the context of cultural values of familism and family obligations (Stein et al., 2014). Even when Latinx samples are included in current scholarship, it has often been from a deficit perspective documenting how risk factors contribute to the educational, psychosocial, and health disparities of this pop-