Biopsychosocial practice and research could be facilitated by a theoretical model that allows for the integration of concepts across levels of systems. Theories about a system’s response to stress have been advanced at the biological, psychological, and sociological levels. In this article, a family stress model, the Family Adjustment and Adaptation Response (FAAR) Model is presented and conceptual links to these other models of stress are suggested. The FAAR Model focuses on three levels of systems: the individual, the family, and the community. The emphasis is on the family system and its efforts to maintain balanced functioning by using its capabilities (resources and coping behaviors) to meet its demands (stressors and strains). This effort to balance demands and capabilities is mediated by the meanings the family ascribes to what is happening to them. Over time, families go through repeated cycles of adjustment (characterized by relative stability), crisis, and adaptation (characterized by discontinuous, secondorder change) in response to normative and nonnormative changes.

One of the challenges facing biopsychosocial scientists is to describe, explain, and ultimately predict the link between the family system and health and illness in individual family members. Two questions that confront us are: How does what occurs in the family environment get inside the human body and make someone sick or well? and What are the pathways and mechanisms by which social conditions affect physiological processes?

One major focus of research and theory-building that is germane to these questions, and that has occurred at...