Family

AS Level Sociology.
Murdoch (1949) characteristics of the family.

• Common residence.
• Economic cooperation
• Reproduction.
• Socially approved sexual relationship.
 Types of family relationships.
• Monogamy

• Polygamy

• Polygyny

• Polyandry
 Households

• Single person household

• Couple households

• Couples who live apart

• Shared household
 Types of family

• Nuclear families
• Reconstituted
• Co habitation
• Same sex.
• Civil partnership
• Lone parent
• Single parent
 Extended Families

• Vertically extended and horizontally extended.

• Vertically extended can be Matri focal or Patri Focal.
• Changes in family and household structure due to
their relationship to industrialisation, urbanisation,
globalisation
 The ‘fit’ Theses

• This argument suggests that industrialisation and

urbanisation contribute to changes in the family and
household.
• Extended families were replaced by nuclear families
that fitted to crucial economic requirements of
geographic mobility and labour flexibility.
 The working class

• Lack of government help for the sick and unemployed

• Kinship network helps secure jobs for family
members.
• Relatives played a vital part in child care.
• Children worked at quite a young age
• The middle-class tended to be nuclear because
of the importance they gave to education, cost
of good schooling etc.
• The upper-class are a mixture of nuclear and
extended families.
 Post industrial society

• Social changes.

• Lifestyle factors.

• Increase life expectancy.

• Beanpole structures
 Diversity in family forms.
Class.

• Single parent.
• Poverty.
• Beanpole structure.
• Joint conjugal roles.
• Segregated conjugal roles.
• Middle-class parents.
• Working class parents.
 Age

• Differences within and between generations

• Different attitudes and lifestyles
• Family formation
• Size
• Structure
 Ethnicity
• Ethnic diversity
• Secularisation
• Differences between ethnic groups.
• Black and Indian women
• Minority ethnic population
• Family structure
• Black Caribbean families
• Asian families.
 Life cycle

• Pre family: Young adults leaving their family of

origin to begin a new family.
• Young adults are separated geographically,
residentially and socially.
• Boomerang kids.
• Both end carers.
 Family size

• Completed family.
• Lower the class, larger the family.
• Children contributed to family income.
• Childlessness.
• Universality of nuclear family.
• The fit thesis.
 Alternatives

• Matrilineal.
• Matrifocal.
• Communes.
• Male female cohabitation.
• Communal living.
• Matrifocal Extended families.
• Composite extended Families
 Relationship between family and the economy

• For the economy to function it needs the family to produce

socialised individuals oriented to words work.
• Consensus.
• Core functions.
• Peripheral functions.
• Neo functionalism
 Conflicts

• In this approach the family’s general role is to support

a capitalist economic system across three dimensions.
• Ideologically.
• Economically.
• Politically.
 Neo Marxism
• It highlights how different types of family capital confer advantages
and disadvantages on children of different classes.
• Cultural capital.
• Institutional investment.
• Class reproduction.
• Range of cultural goods and services.
• Social capital.
• Symbolic capital.
 Feminism

• Family is a oppressive structure.

• Dual burden.
• Triple shift.
• Domestic labour.
• Child care.
 Changes and continuities in family functions

• Parents still play an important role in primary

socialisation.
• The family is the only institution in the industrial
society that is based on particularistic values.
• Pre-industrial family was built on economic
relationships.
 Peripheral functions of the family.

• Education.
• Healthcare.
• Recreation.
• Leisure.
 Relationship between family and state

• Legal norms.
• Moral values.
• Families are influenced and shaped by family
ideology.
• The managerial state.
 Consensus

• In the industrialised world the state has

progressively removed a range of functions
from the family and specially peripheral
functions in areas such as education and
welfare.
 New Right

• From the new right perspective family

structures and relationships such as single
parent third can only be sustained with
government support, something that
encourages dependency culture.
 Conflict

• Marxist view – the financial and moral responsibility is

people take on when they create family groups lock them into
S economic relationships.
• Through primary socialisation, children learn values such as
the importance of the work ethic and norms such as work
itself – both paid and unpaid that integrate them into the
capitalist society.
 Feminism and the state

• Liberal Feminism has traditionally looked to

the state and legal agencies as a way of
redressing gender imbalances in family life
through social policies that will break down
barriers to female emancipation.
 Roles and responsibilities within the family

• Parents – what a society expects parents to do and how

individuals interpret their role in the personal context of
family relationships.
• The penalties for breaking away from the norm were severe,
ranging from male violence against women who try to reject
or renegotiate their role within the family, to general social
disapproval.
 Children and parents

• There is this similarity in the ideas about childhood between

the past and the present.
• How parents relate to children has changed?
• Children today are objects of concern requiring care and just
texting from their parents.
• They are autonomous possesses all rights.
• Economically worthless and emotionally priceless.
 Grand parents

• 30% of UK families depend on grandparents for

childcare.
• 90% of grandparents provide some form of financial
support for the grand children.
• Into generation and tries are important for sociability
and emotional support.
 Conjugal roles and debates about gender
equality within the family:Functionalism
• Willmott and young (1973) coined the term
“stratified diffusion”. As consequent roles in the
upper-class moved towards greater equality, these
changes trickled down the class structure.
 Neo functionalism
• Parents can give their children the
knowledge of both expressive and
instrumental relationship and it doesn’t
matter which partner provides which.
 Marxism
• Families are social spaces involving
complex complex and power struggles.
• Political economy.
• Moral economy.
• Emotional economy.
 Feminism and conjugal roles
• In of conjugal relationship men and women should be
free to choose both the roles and how they are
performed in a family context .
• Equality of opportunity is based on the idea that men
and women can’t compete equally in both public and
private domains.
 Marxist and Feminism
• Capitalism is the real cause of female oppression
because it involves relations of domination,
subordination and oppression.
• Female exploitation inside and outside the family will
continue as long as capitalism exists.
 Post – feminism
• Women are making choices to be mothers or childless
career women.
• Contemporary famines developed around a gender
understanding in which conjugal roles of based on
rational choices about “who does what and when”.
 Changing patterns of marriage, cohabitation, separation, divorce
and childbearing.

• Marriage: as secularisation spread there is less pressure to

marry and the importance of the institution of marriage has
declined.
• Cohabitation: As an alternative to marriage.This is due to the
reduced social pressures to marry, lower levels of stigma
attached to cohabitation and wider availability of contraception
or abortion.
 Divorce
• Legal changes – Each time divorce is made easier or more
affordable.
• Economic changes – divorce is no longer something that only
the rich could afford.
• Women becoming financially independent.
• Couples no longer regard marriage as a sacred institution that
needs to be preserved.
 Child bearing.
• General overall decline in live births.
• Women marrying and having children later in life.
• Increasingly expensive to raise children.
• Many people are feeling that parenthood would disrupt their lives.
• Highly qualified women are likely to remain childless.
• Less need for children as protection against old inch and in this.
• Birth control/contraception/abortion.
 Post modern optimism
• Post modernity encompasses many different family forms.
• Traditional/nuclear.
• Both parents working.
• Single parent.
• Blended (Reconstituted).
• Adopted child.
• Test-tube babies.
• Surrogate mother.
 The impact of family on individual members.
Consensus view.

• Families fulfil a range of needs and functions such as

companionship, security, raising children.
• Stable family relationships provide significant
emotional and psychological Benefits to family
members when we ordinate our identity to words the
family members.
 Conflict.

• Does the cost of family life outweigh its benefits?

• Is it psychologically destructive?
• Socially oppressive and exploitative of women.
• Violent and abusive institution .
 Marxists Feminism.
• Most women take an exploitative role as unpaid
servants to their partners and children.
• Willingness to identify domestic labour with feminty
is a result of patriarchal ideology and socialisation.
 Domestic violence
• 3% of all women and 2% of all men in the UK
experience a minor or severe violence in the hands of
their partner.
• Child abuse – men who are violent towards their
partner are also violent towards children in their care.
 The social construction of age
• Children.
• Youth.
• Adult.
• Elderly
 Age stratification
• Modernisation.

• Cohorts.

• Life course
 Childhood as a concept that is socially constructed.

• Childhood was a simple biological category we

would expect every society to see it in a similar
way.
• Childhood got a special status due to the social
change from pre industrial to industrial society.
 The cross cultural dimension.
• Pre-industrial tribal societies deferred from the
industrial counterpart in three main ways :
• Children were given more responsibility.
• Adult - child relationship were closer and less
authoritarian.
• Children encouraged to explore their sexuality.
 Class
• Economic class into which the child is born has a major
impact on their experience of childhood.
• The cultural capital of non-economic resources such as
knowledge ,skills and personal motivation see children
successfully through the education system.
• Working class children are focused more on the ‘here and
now’ and immediate gratification.
 Gender
• Bearings consciously and unconsciously
treat their children in different ways.
• Individuals who cross the invisible
boundaries risk being negatively sanctioned
for breaking identity norms.
 Ethnicity
• Ethnicity refers to the cultural differences between
social groups.
• Adult control of space refers to wear children should
be at certain times such as in school or at home.
• Family as a work place.
Social position of the elderly in different societies

• Elderly were a burden in nomadic societies as they no

longer can easily follow a nomadic lifestyle .
• In the modern industrial society to be old and wealthy
represents a different social position as being old and
poor.
• Elderly men have greater social status than women.
Theories that illustrate how the elderly themselves construct
their identities and statuses.

• Modernisation theory.
• Disengagement theory.
• Activity theory.
• Social generational theory.
Thank you.