The existing literature suggests that families play a key role in motivating persons with AUD to recognize the need to change, providing support for change, and supporting long-term recovery and that AUD recovery is good for families. Most of our current knowledge, however, has come from studies of relatively small clinical samples or from treatment studies. The lack of community-based research, multisite randomized controlled trials, research on integration of partners and family members in recovery-oriented systems of care, conduct of AUD treatment-specific meta-analyses, and the exclusion of couple- and family-level variables in large-scale longitudinal studies of the onset and course of AUD remain important areas for future research. Similarly, the lack of research on the role of the family in AUD recovery in diverse populations is a major gap in the current literature.
