Families and households - Family diversity Flashcards
What do Functionalists and the New Right consider other family types family to be?
Dysfunctional, abnormal, deviant
What do the New Right say about other family types?
Dangerous to society (one parent household the most dangerous)
As they tend to be headed by female, leave boys without a male role model- creating educational failure, deliquency and social instability
Likely to be poorer - burden to the welfare state and taxpayer
What do the Rapoports argue?
Vast changes taking place in terms of families and households:
- Nuclear family no longer the most common
- Wide range of alternative family types
- Alternatives were growing in number
Family diveristy is hugley positive for society- gives people freedom/choice. No longer pressured into a nuclear family
What are the five types of diveristy the rapoports identified?
Social class - How they raise their children (income differences between households)
Generational - Older and younger generations different attitudes and experiences that reflect historical period in which they lived
Life stage - Family structures differ according to individuals stage in their life cycles
Cultural - Female headed single parent families among afro/carribean households
Organisational - how they organise roles within units
How might feminists view family diveristy?
Reduces patriarchal nuclear family
Women have more options/freedom
What does Chester say?
Rapoports exggerate. Some things may have changed in terms of family structure but in most cases nuclear family is still family type that the majority of people will experience at some point in their life
Still the family type we aspire too evidence:
-Most adults marry and have children
-Cohabitation is temporary phase before marrying/re-marrying
Most people live in a household headed by a married couple
Only change - roles men and women play (neo conventional family which is a dual earner household) Similar to willmott and young (symmetrical family)
What is globalisation?
The world becomes increasingly connected. Time and space become compressed, as people new stories cultural ideas products and services are able to travel rapidly around the world
What has globalisation been caused by? (4)
Economy Politics Culture Technology
What does the post modern society involve?
It is unstable, forever changing and very diverse
Indivduals having lots of freedom and choice, able to make their own decisions
‘Pick and mix approach’ - picking and mixing different family types, based on our varying needs
Stacey: The divorce extended family
Women have more freedom than ever before
Free themselves from patriarchal opression
Women rather than men are the driving force behind changes in the family
May reject traditional housewife role and choose extremly varied life paths
- members are connected y divorce rather than marriage
Giddens ‘Pure relationship’
Family and marraige have been transformed by greater choice and more equal relationship between men and women
Relationships are now characterised:
Basis of marriage changed into one
Pure relationship - exists solely to meet partners needs, stay together because of love, happiness of sexual attraction rather than traditional sense of duty or for the children
Relationships become part of self discovery
Beck: The risk society and negotiated family
Similar view to Giddens. Live in a risk society - tradition has less influence, people have more choice
Patriarchal undermined by greater gender equality and gender individualism
Negotiated families do not conform to the traditional family norm but vary according to the wishes/expectations of their members (less stable even though more equal)
Giddens and Beck: The individualisation thesis
Heavily influenced by postmodernist ideas
Traditional socail structures such as class, gender and family have lost their influence over us
Individuals in todays society have fewer certainties or fixed roles to follow. Become freed or disembedded from tradtitional roles- more freedom to choose how we lead our lives
Beck - standard biography or life course that people followed in the past has been replaced by the do it yourself biography
Life course analysis - who used this method and what does it mean?
Hareven - refers to different stages of an individuals life, how decisions are made by an individual at different stages of their life, may impact upon the household type that they live within
In depth unstructured interviews to explore the meanings that individual family memebers give to relationships they have and choices they make at various turning points in their lives
What the life course analysis allow postmodernists to focus on?
What family members themselves consider to be important, looks at families and households from the point of view of the people involved
