Abstract
Funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme and co‐ordinated by Technical University Dortmund, FAMILYPLATFORM gathers a consortium of 12 organisations working together to articulate key questions about the family for the European Social Science and Humanities Research Agenda 2012‐2013. There are four key stages to the project. The first is to chart and review the major trends of comparative family research in the EU in 8 ‘Existential Fields’ (EF). The second is to critically review existing research on the family, and the third is to build on our understanding of existing issues affecting families and predict future conditions and challenges facing them. The final stage is to bring the results and findings of the previous three stages together, and propose key scientific research questions about families to be tackled with future EU research funding. This Working Report has been produced for the first stage of the project, and is part of a series of reports.