11. Contemp. Persp. Of Family

Question 0

Stevie Jackson entitles a section of her article ‘Whatever Happened to the Sociology of the Family?’ As you read through it you will notice that Jackson is responding to the ____ of functionalst and Marxist approaches within the sociology of the family until the early 1970s.

Answer 0

dominance

Question 1

What these approaches share is the assumption that the family is an ____. In this sense, institution refers to the family as a thing, a key element in the social structure.

Answer 1

institution

Question 2

By the end of the 1970s, theorising the family as a ____ was starting to be challenged by newer sociological approaches.

Answer 2

thing

Question 3

Some sociologists influenced by social movements that had begun in the 1960s especially ____ and the ____ movement critiqued the core intellectual traditions that had formed the basis of the ‘old fashioned’ approaches to socology of the family. Ths critique drew upon an avalanche of empirical research into family life.

Answer 3

feminism and the anti-racism

Question 4

So far reaching was the critique that Canadian sociologist David Cheal has described it as ‘The ___ ____’ that nearly killed off but ultimately reinvigorated the ‘sociology of the family’.

Answer 4

Big Bang

Question 5

After the Big Bang, sociologists came to recognise that ideas about family life were intimately connected with other areas of social life, like ____ and _____.

Answer 5

gender and sexuality

Question 6

Perhaps most importanty, ____ sociologists successfully showed how the idea that the family as ‘a thing’ disguised gendered inequalities within and across family groups. Rather than the family being ‘a unit’, feminists showed that people within families had very different experiences of family life.

Answer 6

feminist

Question 7

Similarly, feminists argued that the old fashioned sociological approaches to the family ignored the experiences of ____ within families, and served to reinforce powerful cultural ideas about the heterosexual nuclear family being a natural rather than social phenomenon.

Answer 7

women

Question 8

Perhaps the biggest impact of the Big Bang on the sociology of the family is the effect it has had on the way that sociologists ____ the family.

Answer 8

conceptualise

Question 9

Since the 1980s, many sociologists have suggested that the ‘the family’ is a term which represents an ____ idea, an ideological construct, rather than the way people actually live.

Answer 9

abstract

Question 10

Some wish to retain the concept of the family, but even those who still define the family as an institution nonetheless ____ it very differently from earlier generations of sociologists.

Answer 10

conceptualise

Question 11

Three main ____ to the family’ have been raised:
the term is essentialist, as it presupposes an essential basic unit discernible in all cultures at all times
it treats as a unity something which is in fact internally differentiated, thus concealing inequalities within it
it masks the diversity of family forms existing in society today.

Answer 11

objections

Question 12

Ess. If used incautiously, especially in cross-cultural and historical analysis, the term ‘the family’ can imply a ____ phenomenon.

Answer 12

universal

Question 13

Ess. Even if it varies in form there is still some essential entity identifiable as the ____ which exists across time and in all societies.

Answer 13

family

Question 14

Ess. The commonly used terms ‘nuclear and extended’ family also suggest a basic nucleus which is, under some circumstances, ____ to a wider orbit of kin.

Answer 14

extended

Question 15

Ess. This ____ view has often entailed treating the family as a clearly bounded unit set apart from wider society, something which is affected by differing or changing social structures but which has no effects beyond its own boundaries.

Answer 15

essentialist

Question 16

Ess. This is why sociologists in the past talked of the effects of industrialisation on the family without considering that family relations might ____ wider social relations.

Answer 16

affect

Question 17

Ess. As we have seen, the term ‘family’ has not had the same meaning throughout ____; household and family relations have not always intersected in the ways they do today.

Answer 17

history

Question 18

Ess. Cross-culturally, there is even greater variability. Anthropological evidence suggests that here is no simple, single entity that can be defined as the ‘family’ and compared across ____.

Answer 18

cultures

Question 19

Ess. What we are dealing with is not a fixed structure but a complex set of ____ and ____ - who counts as kin, who lives with whom, who can or should marry whom, who should perform which activities inside the domestic unit - all of which vary cross-culturally.

Answer 19

relationships and practices

Question 20

Ess. This suggests that the concept of ‘the family’ as we understand it is historically and culturally specific and should be used, if at all, only in the context of ____ society.

Answer 20

contemporary

Question 21

Dif. If families are constituted through a complex of relationships and practices, it follows that individuals are differently located within families and not all members of the same family ____ it in the same way.

Answer 21

experience

Question 22

Dif. In particular, families are differentiated by ____ and ____.

Answer 22

gender and generation

Question 23

Dif. The term the family can often mask these differences. We should not, for example, speak of the effects of poverty on the family, without considering that these eftects might not be felt equally by all family members. Nor should we assume that ‘the family’ or even ‘a family’ acts ____.

Answer 23

collectively

Question 24

Dif. Even when family members do something ____, they may not be engaged in exactly the same activities in precisely the same ways.

Answer 24

together

Question 25

Dif. Work and leisure are ____ distributed within families and families are also sites of power relations.

Answer 25

unequally

Question 26

Dif. Differences within families, however, do not provide grounds for denying is an ____. After all, most social institutions are internally differentiated.

Answer 26

institution

Question 27

Dif. Family relationships appear to be structured, institutionalised relationships despite the ____ of domestic arrangements existing in society today.

Answer 27

diversity

Question 28

Div. It is certainly the case that the ____ idea of “the family” does not correspond with the lived reality of family life.

Answer 28

abstract

Question 29

Div. In one sense ‘the family’ is an ____ construct, and one with considerable emotional appeal - which is why it is often invoked by politicians to win us to their cause and by advertisers to encourage us to buy their products.

Answer 29

ideological

Question 30

Div. But this ideal does have real effects; it encourages us to look to the family to meet our personal, social and emotional needs; it serves as a perpetual excuse for the paucity of public services; it encourages us to blame ourselves or our partners if our own family life does not live up to expectations. In a sense, then, this representation of ‘the family’ is ‘____’.

Answer 30

anti-social

Question 31

Div. Moreover, the popular image of the family is an ____ one, based on ‘white families’, which obscures ethnic differences in patterns of family life.

Answer 31

ethnocentric

Question 32

Div. Conceptualising the family from a ‘white’ perspective can easily lead to a failure to appreciate cultural differences and to branding ‘black’ families as ____.

Answer 32

deviant

Question 33

Div. The main reason for the disjunction between the ideal of ‘the family’ and lived experience, or so it is argued, is that there is no ____ or ____ family but rather a diverse and shifting array of different forms of household.

Answer 33

normal or typical

Question 34

Families are not static entities, but ____ ones, changing over the life course as people marry, rear children and see their children leave home - or as couples divorce or remarry or one of them dies.

Answer 34

dynamic

Question 35

Looked at this way, we gain a rather different picture of family life: it is certainly shifting and dynamic, but most of the population live in households based on ____ ____ for much of their lives.

Answer 35

family relationships

Question 36

Moreover, if we look only at households, we forget that family ties ____ after family households have broken up.

Answer 36

persist

Question 37

Significant family relationships, carrying with them all manner of social ____ and ____, exist across the boundaries of households as well as within them.

Answer 37

expectations and obligations

Question 38

Nuclear family households may be a minority, but most of us have ____.

Answer 38

families

Question 39

Even if we are wary of the concept of the family per se, it must be accepted that the most crucial elements of family life, the bonds of marriage and parenthood are ____ through social expectations and legal regulation.

Answer 39

institutionalised

Question 40

These debates around the concept of the family have made sociologists much more aware of the ____ of family life, of the interplay between family, household and kinship networks.

Answer 40

complexity