The Family Stability Construct: Toward a Unifying Theory for the Science of Attendance

Abstract

School attendance research has historically been organized around the language of absence including truancy, exclusion, refusal, and chronic absenteeism but measured at the level of the individual student. This paper argues that the field has reached the conceptual limits of an absence-centered paradigm and proposes a reorientation around a single upstream construct: family stability. Drawing on the published architecture of the Perceptions of School Social Bonding (PSSB) instrument (Gentle-Genitty, Keppens, & Kearney, 2024), the author's program of research on attendance as a social-bonding phenomenon (Heyne et al., 2024; Kearney et al., 2026; Gentle-Genitty et al., 2026), and a synthesis of the published family-instability literature built on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and its Child/Young Adult cohort (NLSY79/CNLSY), this paper introduces the Family Stability Bullseye. This is a theoretical model situating household stability as the proximal target of attendance intervention, with school connectedness, community supports, and policy systems arranged as concentric, mediating layers. The paper further situates this model within a proposed disciplinary identity, Attendance Science, defined as the transdisciplinary study of presence, belonging, and engagement as measurable, modifiable, and policy-actionable phenomena distinct from the compliance-oriented study of absence. The contribution is theoretical and integrative rather than the report of a new primary data analysis; it is offered as a conceptual foundation and pre-registration of a forthcoming empirical research agenda using NLSY79/CNLSY, ISRD4, and CPLI Indiana administrative data.