Reuben Hill

Reuben Lorenzo Hill Jr. (July 4, 1912 – September 26, 1985) was an American sociologist. He specialized in the sociology of the family. He has been called "the founding father of family sociology". In his youth he served as a missionary in Europe for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He received his PhD in 1938 from the University of Wisconsin. He later taught at the University of South Dakota (1942–1945), Iowa State University (1945–1949), University of North Carolina (1949–1957) and University of Minnesota (1957–1983). At Minnesota, he held the title of the Regents’ Professor of family sociology from 1973. Bert N. Adams described him as "one of the leading scholars in the field of marriage and the family".

Wesley R. Burr described Hill's contribution as follows: eveloping a model to study family crises, conducting theory-based field experiments, organising the first bibliographic storage system in the field, developing the methodology to study three generations of families simultaneously, initiating graduate traineeships in the family field, helping to develop the family development conceptual framework, developing methods to improve theory, dramatically improving theory, and helping to establish the Theory and Method workshops that are held in conjunction with the annual meetings of the National Council on Family Relations.

Olson and Boss mention that Hill's "ABC-X model describing family stress [presented in 1958] has had an immense impact on the field".

Awards He received, among others, the first Ernest W. Burgess Award given by the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR).