Submission guidelines

Prior to submission, please carefully read and follow the submission guidelines detailed below. Manuscripts that do not conform to the submission guidelines may be returned without review.

Submissions are handled only through our Editorial Manager platformopens in new window, and the only official journal website is through APA. If you believe you interacted with a fraudulent website for this journal, please email APA Journalsopens in new window. Review our resource for authors for more information on identifying predatory journals.

To submit to the editorial office of Michelle D. Sherman, please submit manuscripts electronically through the Manuscript Submission Portal in Microsoft Word format (.doc) or LaTex (.tex) as a zip file with an accompanied Portable Document Format (.pdf) of the manuscript file.

Prepare manuscripts according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association using the 7^th edition. Manuscripts may be copyedited for bias-free language (see Chapter 5 of the Publication Manual). APA Style and Grammar Guidelines for the 7^th edition are available.

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Michelle D. Sherman, editor
Private Practice
Emailopens in new window

Do not submit manuscripts to the editor's email address.

In addition to addresses and phone numbers, please supply email addresses for use by the editorial office and later by the production office.

We seek manuscripts that span the broad universe of couple and family psychology, including but not limited to:

• theory
• assessment
• interventions
• clinical case studies (see below)
• treatment processes (e.g., therapeutic relationship)
• specialty competencies
• ethics
• diversity issues in working with couples and families

Clinical Implications Section: All manuscripts must conclude with an “implications and applications” section. Although this can be brief (2-3 paragraphs), it is one of the most important sections. It should provide concrete and usable information that can be applied in everyday clinical practice or in training programs.

We welcome interdisciplinary collaboration as well as manuscripts describing the application of couple and family psychology in diverse settings (e.g., integrated behavioral health in primary care, incarceration and reentry, military/veteran settings).

Treatment-focused articles may focus on particular clinical problem domains from a systemic perspective (e.g., substance abuse, depression, eating disorders, relationship issues, sexuality).

Clinical case studies involve a detailed analysis of the therapy conducted with a couple or family that will be instructive, may be exemplary or cautionary, and stresses factors contributing to either success or failure of the treatment. Because evidence-based clinical case studies can be difficult to do well, Evidence-Based Case Study Guidelines are provided.

Research-focused articles may report the findings of studies that use a variety of research methods and data, both qualitative and quantitative. CFP-RP welcomes articles with carefully selected research methods that are best fitted to answer the research questions. Research articles should not exceed a total of 30 pages, all inclusive. 

Brief reports are encouraged for innovative work that may be premature for publication as a full research report because of small sample size, novel methodologies, etc. Brief reports also are an appropriate format for pilot studies, replications, and clinical case studies. Authors of brief reports should indicate in the cover letter that the full report is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Brief reports should be designated as such and should not exceed a total of 20 pages, all inclusive. References should not exceed 8 pages.

The editor welcomes inquiries regarding the suitability of ideas for regular articles.

Double-space all copy. Other formatting instructions, as well as instructions on preparing tables, figures, references, metrics, and abstracts, appear in the Manual. Additional guidance on APA Style is available on the APA Style website.

If your manuscript was mask reviewed, please ensure that the final version for production includes a byline and full author note for typesetting.

Below are additional instructions regarding the preparation of display equations, computer code, and tables.

All manuscripts must include an abstract containing a maximum of 250 words typed on a separate page. After the abstract, please supply up to five keywords or brief phrases.

To promote the accessibility of article content to broad and diverse audiences, authors should provide two to three brief sentences regarding the relevance or public health significance of the manuscript. The statement should be written in language that is easily understood by the public. 

Please read the Guidance for Translational Abstracts and Public Significance Statements in preparing this statement.

The public significance statement should be included within the manuscript on the abstract/keywords page.

Prior to acceptance and publication, public significance statements will be reviewed for accuracy and adherence to these standards.

The APA Publication Manual (7th ed.opens in new window) stipulates that "authorship encompasses…not only persons who do the writing but also those who have made substantial scientific contributions to a study." In the spirit of transparency and openness, this journal has adopted the Contributor Roles Taxonomyopens in new window (CRediT) to describe each author's individual contributions to the work. CRediT offers authors the opportunity to share an accurate and detailed description of their diverse contributions to a manuscript.

Submitting authors will be prompted to select one or more contributor roles for each author at initial submission. All authors should have reviewed and agreed to their individual contribution(s) before submission. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, an Author Contributions Statement will be generated during the typesetting process and published in the author note of the final article. It is not necessary for authors to provide a written Author Contributions Statement upon submission.

CRediT includes 14 contributor roles, as described below:

• Conceptualization: Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
• Data curation: Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later reuse.
• Formal analysis: Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.
• Funding acquisition: Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
• Investigation: Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
• Methodology: Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
• Project administration: Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
• Resources: Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
• Software: Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
• Supervision: Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
• Validation: Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
• Visualization: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
• Writing—original draft: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
• Writing—review and editing: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision—including pre- or post-publication stages.

Authors can claim credit for more than one contributor role, and the same role can be attributed to more than one author. Not all roles will be applicable to any particular scholarly work.

The method section of each empirical report must contain a detailed description of the study participants, including (but not limited to) the following:

• age
• gender
• race and ethnicity
• any other relevant demographics (e.g., sexual orientation, religion/theodiversity)

Please refer to and follow the bias-free language guidelines contained in section 5 of the 7th edition of the APA Publication Manual.

It is strongly recommended that authors report study participant characteristics related to socioeconomic status (SES). These demographic characteristics allow researchers and journal readers to properly contextualize and interpret research findings. We recognize there is no standard definition or measurement criteria for SES and related indicators (e.g., social class, income, education, occupation), and encourage authors to document SES demographic characteristics to the best extent possible in their manuscript submission. For reference, authors are encouraged to read the following articles related to SES conceptualization and measurement:

Diemer, M., Mistry, R., Wadsworth, M., Lopez, I., & Reimers, F. (2013). Best practices in conceptualizing and measuring social class in psychological research. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 13, 77-113. doi:10.1111/asap.12001.

Navarro-Carrillo, G., Alonso-Ferres, M., Moya, M., & Valor-Segura, I. (2020). Socioeconomic status and psychological well-being: Revisiting the role of subjective socioeconomic status. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1303.

Authors are encouraged to justify their sample demographics in the Discussion section. If Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) or all-White samples are used, authors should justify their samples and describe their sample inclusion efforts (see Roberts, et al., 2020 for more information on justifying sample demographics).

The method section also must include a statement describing how informed consent was obtained from the participants (or their parents/guardians) and indicate that the study was conducted in compliance with an appropriate Internal Review Board.

Authors are encouraged to include a positionality statement in the author note. Positionality statements are intended to address potential author bias by transparently reporting how the identities of the authors relate to the research/article topic and to the identity of the participants, as well as the extent to which those identities are represented in the scientific record. The statement should be included in the author note and expanded upon in the discussion section. See this example from Jovanova, et al. (2022)opens in new window: 

• Sample positionality statement: “Mindful that our identities can influence our approach to science (Roberts, et al. 2020)opens in new window, the authors wish to provide the reader with information about our backgrounds. With respect to gender, when the manuscript was drafted, four authors self-identified as women and four authors as men. With respect to race, six authors self-identified as white, one as South Asian and one as East Asian.” 

For more guidance on writing positionality statements, see Roberts, et al. (2020)opens in new window and Hamby (2018)opens in new window. 

The journal welcomes submissions that proactively challenge racism and other forms of oppression. In line with the APA Guidelines on Race and Ethnicity in Psychology (2019)opens in new window, authors are encouraged to include reflexive statements in the Discussion section, addressing the following questions. 

• What are the policy implications of these findings? 
• Could this research be misinterpreted or misused to negatively affect underrepresented groups? Does the research have the potential to cause harm to vulnerable groups? If so, how can this be addressed and mitigated? 
• Does the design or framing of this research reinforce negative stereotypes about marginalized populations? 
• What roles do the researcher(s)’ values and worldview play in the selection of this topic or design of the study? 

Research has shown that there is often a racial/ethnic and gender imbalance in article reference lists, and that Black women’s work is disproportionately not credited or cited as often as White authors’ work (Kwon, 2022opens in new window). Authors are encouraged to ensure their citations are fully representative by both gender and racial identity before submitting and during the manuscript revision process. Authors are encouraged to evaluate the race and gender of the authors in their reference lists (see this open-source code by Zhou, et al., 2020opens in new window, that authors can use to predict the gender and race of the authors in their reference lists) and to report the results in a citation diversity statement in the author note or Discussion section of the manuscript.  

See Dworkin, et al. (2020)opens in new window’s sample citation diversity statement: 

“Citation Diversity Statement. Recent work in neuroscience and other fields has identified a bias in citation practices such that papers from women and other minorities are under-cited relative to the number of such papers in the field (Caplar et al., 2017, Chakravartty et al., 2018, Dion et al., 2018, Dworkin et al., 2020, Maliniak et al., 2013, Thiem et al., 2018). Here, we sought to proactively consider choosing references that reflect the diversity of the field in thought, gender, race, geography, seniority, and other factors. We used automatic classification of gender based on the first names of the first and last authors (Dworkin et al., 2020, Zhou et al., 2020), with possible combinations including man/man, man/woman, woman/man, and woman/woman. Code for this classification is open source and available online (Zhou et al., 2020). We regret that our current methodology is limited to consideration of gender as a binary variable. Excluding self-citations to the first and last authors of our current paper, the references contain 12.5% man/man, 25% man/woman, 25% woman/man, 37.5% woman/woman, and 0% unknown categorization. We look forward to future work that could help us to better understand how to support equitable practices in science.” 

Authors are encouraged to disclose the year(s) of data collection in both the abstract and in the method section in order to appropriately contextualize the study. 

Authors who feel that their manuscript may benefit from additional academic writing or language editing support prior to submission are encouraged to seek out such services at their host institutions, engage with colleagues and subject matter experts, and/or consider several vendors that offer discounts to APA authors.

Please note that APA does not endorse or take responsibility for the service providers listed. It is strictly a referral service. Use of such service is not mandatory for publication in an APA journal. Use of one or more of these services does not guarantee selection for peer review, manuscript acceptance, or preference for publication in any APA journal.

When discussing limitations in the discussion section, authors must include the “constraints on generality” (see Simons, Shoda, & Lindsay, 2017opens in new window). In this section, authors should detail grounds for concluding that results are specific to characteristics of the participants and address limits on generality not only for participants but for materials, procedures, and context. They should also specify which methods the authors think could be varied without affecting the result and which should remain constant.

We strongly encourage you to use MathType (third-party software) or Equation Editor 3.0 (built into pre-2007 versions of Word) to construct your equations, rather than the equation support that is built into Word 2007 and Word 2010. Equations composed with the built-in Word 2007/Word 2010 equation support are converted to low-resolution graphics when they enter the production process and must be rekeyed by the typesetter, which may introduce errors.

To construct your equations with MathType or Equation Editor 3.0:

• Go to the Text section of the Insert tab and select Object.
• Select MathType or Equation Editor 3.0 in the drop-down menu.

If you have an equation that has already been produced using Microsoft Word 2007 or 2010 and you have access to the full version of MathType 6.5 or later, you can convert this equation to MathType by clicking on MathType Insert Equation. Copy the equation from Microsoft Word and paste it into the MathType box. Verify that your equation is correct, click File, and then click Update. Your equation has now been inserted into your Word file as a MathType Equation.

Use Equation Editor 3.0 or MathType only for equations or for formulas that cannot be produced as Word text using the Times or Symbol font.

Because altering computer code in any way (e.g., indents, line spacing, line breaks, page breaks) during the typesetting process could alter its meaning, we treat computer code differently from the rest of your article in our production process. To that end, we request separate files for computer code.

In online supplemental material

We request that runnable source code be included as supplemental material to the article. For more information, visit Supplementing Your Article With Online Material.

In the text of the article

If you would like to include code in the text of your published manuscript, please submit a separate file with your code exactly as you want it to appear, using Courier New font with a type size of 8 points. We will make an image of each segment of code in your article that exceeds 40 characters in length. (Shorter snippets of code that appear in text will be typeset in Courier New and run in with the rest of the text.) If an appendix contains a mix of code and explanatory text, please submit a file that contains the entire appendix, with the code keyed in 8-point Courier New.

Use Word's insert table function when you create tables. Using spaces or tabs in your table will create problems when the table is typeset and may result in errors.

Academic writing and English language editing services

Authors who feel that their manuscript may benefit from additional academic writing or language editing support prior to submission are encouraged to seek out such services at their host institutions, engage with colleagues and subject matter experts, and/or consider several vendors that offer discounts to APA authors.

Please note that APA does not endorse or take responsibility for the service providers listed. It is strictly a referral service.

Use of such service is not mandatory for publication in an APA journal. Use of one or more of these services does not guarantee selection for peer review, manuscript acceptance, or preference for publication in any APA journal.

Authors should review the APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS) for quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. The standards offer ways to improve transparency in reporting to ensure that readers have the information necessary to evaluate the quality of the research and to facilitate collaboration and replication. The JARS: 

• recommend the division of hypotheses, analyses, and conclusions into primary, secondary, and exploratory groupings to allow for a full understanding of quantitative analyses presented in a manuscript and to enhance reproducibility; 
• offer modules for authors reporting on replications, clinical trials, longitudinal studies, and observational studies, as well as the analytic methods of structural equation modeling and Bayesian analysis; and 
• include guidelines on reporting on of study preregistration (including making protocols public); participant characteristics (including demographic characteristics; inclusion and exclusion criteria) psychometric characteristics of outcome measures and other variables, and planned data diagnostics and analytic strategy. 

JARS-Qual offers guidance to researchers using qualitative methods such as narrative data, grounded theory, phenomenological, critical, discursive, performative, ethnographic, consensual qualitative, case study, psychobiography, and thematic analysis approaches. 

The guidelines focus on transparency in methods reporting, recommending descriptions of how the researcher’s own perspective affected the study, as well as the contexts in which the research and analysis took place. 

Authors should also review the new Journal Article Reporting Standards for Race, Ethnicity, and Culture (JARS–REC). Meant for all authors, regardless of research topic, JARS–REC include standards for all stages of research and manuscript writing, on, for example: 

• Using the title, abstract, and keywords to identify race and ethnicity of participants without signaling Whiteness as default; 
• Discussing the applicability of the theoretical approach to populations for which it was not developed; 
• Addressing limits on generality, recognizing that generalizability is always constrained and is not the primary purpose of every study; and 
• Considering whether findings could be used or misused to cause harm. 

For more, see the Guidance for Authors sections of the table (PDF, 184KB)opens in new window. 

APA can place supplemental materials online, available via the published article in the APA PsycArticles^® database.

List references in alphabetical order. Each listed reference should be cited in text, and each text citation should be listed in the references section.

Examples of basic reference formats:

Journal article

McCauley, S. M., & Christiansen, M. H. (2019). Language learning as language use: A cross-linguistic model of child language development. Psychological Review, 126(1), 1–51. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000126opens in new window

Authored book

Brown, L. S. (2018). Feminist therapy (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000092-000opens in new window

Chapter in an edited book

Balsam, K. F., Martell, C. R., Jones. K. P., Safren, S. A. (2019). Affirmative cognitive behavior therapy with sexual and gender minority people. In G. Y. Iwamasa & P. A. Hays (Eds.), Culturally responsive cognitive behavior therapy: Practice and supervision (2nd ed., pp. 287–314). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000119-012opens in new window

Data set citation

Alegria, M., Jackson, J. S., Kessler, R. C., & Takeuchi, D. (2016). Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (CPES), 2001–2003 [Data set]. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR20240.v8opens in new window

Software/Code citation

Viechtbauer, W. (2010). Conducting meta-analyses in R with the metafor package.  Journal of Statistical Software, 36(3), 1–48. https://www.jstatsoft.org/v36/i03/opens in new window

Wickham, H. et al., (2019). Welcome to the tidyverse. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(43), 1686, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01686opens in new window

All data, program code, and other methods must be appropriately cited in the text and listed in the references section.

Tables should adhere to APA Styleopens in new window. Use Word’s Insert Table function to create tables, and do not insert tabs or extra spaces to align columns as this will create problems when the table is typeset.

Preferred formats for graphics files are TIFF and JPG, and preferred format for vector-based files is EPS. Graphics downloaded or saved from web pages are not acceptable for publication. Multipanel figures (i.e., figures with parts labeled a, b, c, d, etc.) should be assembled into one file. When possible, please place symbol legends below the figure instead of to the side.

Resolution 

• All color line art and halftones: 300 DPI 
• Black and white line tone and gray halftone images: 600 DPI 

Line weights 

• Adobe Photoshop images 
• Color (RGB, CMYK) images: 2 pixels 
• Grayscale images: 4 pixels 
• Adobe Illustrator Images 
• Stroke weight: 0.5 points 

APA offers authors the option to publish their figures online in color without the costs associated with print publication of color figures.

The same caption will appear on both the online (color) and print (black and white) versions. To ensure that the figure can be understood in both formats, authors should add alternative wording (e.g., “the red (dark gray) bars represent”) as needed.

Color figure fees

For authors who prefer their figures to be published in color both in print and online, original color figures can be printed in color at the editor's and publisher's discretion provided the author agrees to pay: 

• $900 for one figure 
• An additional $600 for the second figure 
• An additional $450 for each subsequent figure

We strongly encourage you to use MathType (third-party software) or Equation Editor 3.0 (built into pre-2007 versions of Word) to construct your equations, rather than the equation support that is built into Word 2007 and Word 2010. Equations composed with the built-in Word 2007/Word 2010 equation support are converted to low-resolution graphics when they enter the production process and must be rekeyed by the typesetter, which may introduce errors.

To construct your equations with MathType or Equation Editor 3.0:

• Go to the Text section of the Insert tab and select Object.
• Select MathType or Equation Editor 3.0 in the drop-down menu.

If you have an equation that has already been produced using Microsoft Word 2007 or 2010 and you have access to the full version of MathType 6.5 or later, you can convert this equation to MathType by clicking on MathType Insert Equation. Copy the equation from Microsoft Word and paste it into the MathType box. Verify that your equation is correct, click File, and then click Update. Your equation has now been inserted into your Word file as a MathType Equation.

Use Equation Editor 3.0 or MathType only for equations or for formulas that cannot be produced as Word text using the Times or Symbol font.

Because altering computer code in any way (e.g., indents, line spacing, line breaks, page breaks) during the typesetting process could alter its meaning, we treat computer code differently from the rest of the article in the production process. Supply separate files for computer code.

In online supplemental material

Runnable source code should be included as supplemental material to the article. For more information, visit supplementing your article with online material.

In the text of the article

If authors would like to include code in the text of the published article, submit a separate file with your code exactly as it should appear, using Courier New font with a type size of 8 points. An image will be made of each segment of code in your article that exceeds 40 characters in length. (Shorter snippets of code that appear in text will be typeset in Courier New and run in with the rest of the text.) If an appendix contains a mix of code and explanatory text, please submit a file that contains the entire appendix, with the code keyed in 8-point Courier New.

Authors of accepted papers must obtain and provide to the editor on final acceptance all necessary permissions to reproduce in print and electronic form any copyrighted work, including test materials (or portions thereof), photographs, and other graphic images (including those used as stimuli in experiments).

On advice of counsel, APA may decline to publish any image whose copyright status is unknown.

• Download Permissions Alert Form (PDF, 13KB)opens in new window

APA holds policies that apply to all journals published. These include policies on author contributorship and responsibilities of authors; author name changes after publication; the use of generative artificial intelligence; funder information and conflict-of-interest disclosures; duplicate publication; data publication and reuse; and preprints. Please also refer to individual journal submission guidance for specific practices and requirements for manuscript submission.

A key convention in the publication of research is the peer review process, in which the quality and potential contribution of each manuscript is evaluated by one's peers in the scientific community. Like other scientific journals, APA journals utilize a peer review process to guide manuscript selection and publication decisions.

In light of changing patterns of scientific knowledge dissemination, APA requires authors to provide information on prior dissemination of the data and narrative interpretations of the data/research appearing in the manuscript (e.g., if some or all were presented at a conference or meeting, posted on a listserv, shared on a website, including academic social networks like ResearchGate, etc.). This information (2–4 sentences) must be provided as part of the author note.

APA policy prohibits an author from submitting the same manuscript for concurrent consideration by two or more publications.

APA requires authors to reveal any possible conflict of interest in the conduct and reporting of research (e.g., financial interests in a test or procedure, funding by pharmaceutical companies for drug research).

APA Journals aims to address systemic inequities and bias, promote equitable opportunities for researchers, and foster an inclusive environment within the psychological research and scholarly publishing communities, representative of the wide array of people that psychology consists of and serves. Please refer to individual journal submission guidance for specific EDI practices and requirements for manuscript submission.

The APA Journals™ Program is committed to publishing transparent, rigorous research; improving reproducibility in science; and aiding research discovery. Open science practices vary across subfields and per editor discretion, and APA Publishing supports all efforts to improve openness and transparency, especially as they improve diversity, equity, and inclusion. Please refer to individual journal submission guidance for specific OS practices and requirements for manuscript submission.

The APA Journals Office supports authors’ choices on how to publish their work. We are committed to offering options that we believe comply with most funder and institutional requirements and support both self-archiving (“green”) and APC (paid for via an article processing charge and also known as “gold”) Open Access options. Submitting a manuscript for peer review is free of charge.

APA’s current policies on generative AI include:

• When a generative AI model is used in the drafting of a manuscript for an APA publication, the use of AI must be disclosed in the methods section and cited.
• AI cannot be named as an author on an APA scholarly publication.

APA policy prohibits an author from submitting the same manuscript for concurrent consideration by two or more publications. Preprints are allowed.

Authors of accepted papers must obtain and provide on final acceptance all necessary permissions to reproduce in print and electronic form any copyrighted work, including test materials (or portions thereof), photographs, and other graphic images (including those used as stimuli in experiments).

On advice of counsel, APA may decline to publish any image whose copyright status is unknown.

It is a violation of APA Ethical Principles to publish “as original data, data that have been previously published” (Standard 8.13).

APA Ethical Principles also state that “after research results are published, psychologists do not withhold the data on which their conclusions are based from other competent professionals who seek to verify the substantive claims through reanalysis and who intend to use such data only for that purpose, provided that the confidentiality of the participants can be protected and unless legal rights concerning proprietary data preclude their release” (Standard 8.14).

APA expects authors to make their data available if asked during the editorial process and for at least five years after the date of publication.

If the manuscript is accepted, the corresponding author is required to sign and submit a Certification of Compliance with APA Ethical Principles (PDF, 26KB).opens in new window

See APA’s Publishing Policies page for more information on publication policies, including information on author contributorship and responsibilities of authors, author name changes after publication, the use of generative artificial intelligence, funder information and conflict-of-interest disclosures, duplicate publication, data publication and reuse, and preprints.

Visit the Journals Publishing Resource Center for more resources for writing, reviewing, and editing articles for publishing in APA journals.