This theory was first brought about by Salvador Minuchin when he was conducting research with delinquent boys who came from poor families in New York (Corey). The usual client in this study was the “urban, minority group member who is experiencing poverty, discrimination, fear, crowdedness, and street-living,” and the family was typically underorganized (Minuchin).
From these ideas structural-strategic approaches stemmed and include an approach involving joining, boundary setting, unbalancing, reframing, ordeals, paradoxical inventions and enactments. This gave therapists the opportunity to break the family down into subsystems in order to better understand and answer the questions that structural strategic therapy asks. All of the research done by Minuchin and most other structural family therapists originated in financially deprived families and was done with an array of multicultural families. However the first studies were primarily focusing on Hispanic and African-American