Families and Households - Theorists Flashcards

Question

Riggo and Weiser (2008) | The changing nature of family structures

Answer 1

Family diversity is a positive thing

Answer 2

* Feminists * Events in the family (e.g. divorce) remain gendered in sense that men and women have different experiences of family life with women often still experiencing powerlessness

Answer 3

Greater individualism has led to the creation of families of choice where relationships are created including same sex families

Answer 4

* Argues families within postmodern society can be described as no longer based around one dominant structure * Rather the family structure, roles, and relationships are characteristed by diversity, choice, and fluidity * Bases these claims on her own research in California where women in particular adapt their family life according to the increasing choices that are available to them

Answer 5

* The symmetrical family * Optimistically suggested they had evidence to suggest relationships were becoming more similar and that men and women were beginning to share domestic labour more equally

Answer 6

* Found women often feel they're working much of the time * Women who work full time are also responsible for about two-thirds of the time heterosexual couples spend on housework * Not a satisfactory work-life balance * Despite being responsible for most of the housework women work full time did not expereince greater feelings of work-life conflict than men working similar hours suggesting it is not just women feeling strain of paid and house work

Answer 7

* Women find they have to reduce the time they spend on unpaid work when they increase their hours of paid work * Men are not compensating by an equivalent take-up of unpaid work * Refers to this time delay between women working full time and men taking more responsibility for domestic work lagged adaptation

Answer 8

* Survey of 37 cohabitating lesbians with young children foccusing on the negotiations of tasks within the household * Found because lesbian couples don't have traditional gender scripts their relationship were much more egalitarian * On average couples in the study relationships had a 40:60 split of household chores * Lesbian couples deliberately choose to avoid the traditional male/female imbalance in relation to domestic work

Answer 9

* Postmodernity is characterised by increasing emphasis on individual choices/individualisation * Marks a depature from forming relationships based on societal expectations

Answer 10

* Marriage has become more focused on being a relationship in which parenting is shared * Divorce offers women a change to try to redefine their relationship and find less oppressive relationships * Made more difficult as a result of recent divorce laws which mean that co-parenting continues beyond divorce * Women are having fewer children and families are smaller which meant that childbearing practices are changing

Answer 11

* More and more people are favouring chosen family members rather than seeing biological relatedness as primarily significant * Relationships create the individual and are highly significant * 2 Proccesses known as relationality

Answer 12

* Sociologists should try to understand family life through people's memories arguing people's values shape what's remembered * Misztal says these memories provide important information about family relationships and that they're used to creat and reinforce bonds as well as to change identities * Reveals how important person life is considered to be in understanding family life today

Answer 13

To understand family life today people's biographies should be explored through people presenting their lives through pictures, videos and objects so that their relationship and family life can be better understood

Answer 14

* Some women they interviewed felt emotionally deserted * With their husbands leaving them to carry out all the emotion work in the family * Emotion work includes offering emotional support, looking after ill children and listening to problems of family members * Leaves women feeling they r taking on a triple shift (paid work, house work, emotion work)

Answer 15

* Found accounting practives were not consistent * But at the same time they were very meaningful for couples * Method of money management in couples reflects who earns more * Joint account continues to be a powerful symbol of marital togetherness * increasing concern with financial autonomy is showing in the growth of partial pooling where couples combine joint and sole accounts * Provides couples with a way of maintaining individual autonomy while also sharing resources

Answer 16

* Postmodernist * Explains howthere was little or no initmacy in love relationships before modernity * Public relationships were based on economic factors * In modern and postmodern era it has become possible to create and sustain long-term loving relationships * Modernity led to a greater equality and respect making intimate relationships more possible and desirables * Calls this type of relationship a pure relationship

Answer 17

* Increasing availability of effective birth control, casual relationships have become more common * Higher level of trust is needed to be created between couples to commit to each other * Individualisation challenges the notion of long-term monagamous relationships * Embeddedness refers to the specific view of how a relationship is seen by the individual and the social networks it may lead to as well as how it's perceived publically * Marriage is a confirmation of certain expectations couples have about trusting eachother and what happens if trust is broken (childcare payments) * The more the relationship is embedded the more likely the relationship it to endure

Answer 18

* Recent evidence that suggests an increase in physical and sexual violence among teenage relationships an area which was under-researched

Answer 19

* Domestic violence is a significant problem in same sex relationships * Domestic abuse is expereinced in very similar ways by those in lesbian and gay relationships although men were more likely to experience sexual abuse * Tendency in some cases for the respondents not to define domestic violence because it is more likley to be emotional or sexual abuse than physical * Younger respondents more likely to report domestic violence * Many incidents not reported because they believed they wouldn't receive a sympathetic response * Tendency for respondent to see it as their fault

Answer 20

That although all humans experience the same physical stages of development, the experience of childhood is entirely socially constructed

Answer 21

* Late childhood and teenage years girls develop a bedroom culture * Bedroom culture describes ways in which girls organise their culture at home in a way that reflects gendered socialisation * Girls see their bedrooms as private spaces free from intimidation by males

Answer 22

Children who are poor often have negative experiences of childhood

Answer 23

Children who come from affluent backgrounds may experience toxic parenting where good parenting is being replaced with technology e.g. computer games

Answer 24

* Childhood emerged as a social construct from around the seventeenth century * During the middle ages children were smiply expected to act in adult ways and were exposed to adult information * Pictures that show children were given adult responsibilities and clothing * Childhood is neither inevitable nor natural * Key factor was the decline in infant mortality which meant that parents wished to invest more energy into their children and as a result childhood became a more valued experience * Nuclear family took form same time as childhood emerged

Answer 25

* Age patriarchy * children are controlled by adults * A result of children being made to be financially dependent on adults

Answer 26

* New forms of surveillance by the state ensure parents are being watched and checked which represents a new ay that the state controls adults and children alike

Answer 27

* Argues the rise and fall of the print media has led to the blurring of line between children and adults * In the past children had to read in order to gain acess to adults worlds * Today children have much greater access to adult worlds through television, the internet and advertising * This will result in the disappearance of childhood ## Footnote AO3: * Lacking evidence * Others claim children remain seperate and protected from adult world

Answer 28

* Increasing concerns about role of technology in encouraging sedentary behaviour in children's lives * Concerns stems from the idea that technology such as computer games is being given to children as a substitute for good parenting * Calls this toxic childhood * Rather than spend quality time with their children parents are happy to use television, computer games, fast food to placate them * Children grow up easily distractible, self-absorbed, and less socialable

Answer 29

* Due to rising life expectancy there are a greater number of beanpole families * Grandparents may play a more significant role in lives of their children/grandchildren helping them financially/childcare

Answer 30

* People have become more concerned with their own individual needs * Calls this individualsation * People no longer have to follow traditional norms and values and instead make their own decisions * Resulted in fewer people feeling they should have children

Answer 31

* Growth of population in the industrialised world during industrialisation to the present was due to improvement in overall standards of living (especially diet) resulting in increased affluence rather than advancements in medicine and public health

Answer 32

* Infectious diseases have declined to low levels with the epedemics in the early part of the century no longer occuring * Declining death rate due to hygeine and improved nutritution and a lack of absolute poverty * Better nutrition helped to increase people's resistance to infectious diseases * Challenging to investigate death rates when definition of disease and cases of death has changed

Answer 33

* By middle of this century there will be no systematic decline in the population in sucesively higher age groups for the first 80 yrs of life * Today there remains significantly fewer 6-80yr olds but by 2041 this will no longer be true

Answer 34

* Produced to assess effectiveness of care in the community * Gov and managers should be involved with increasing the efficency and organisation of care in the community * Report coincided with introduction of privatisation of some parts of care in the community * Report was partly in recognition of the fact that there were growing numbers of elderly people

Answer 35

* Effects of an ageing population * Results in longer retiremnet period * Breaking down the barriers between mid and later life * Positive ageing also creates new needs nd new norms with new forms of deviance * Living longer is leading to increasing oppurtunites for older people and a shift in popular culture to include grey consumerism and culture * Grandparents are increasingly involved with caring for their grandchildren, playing a more significant role in their lives as often both parents work

Answer 36

1. **Stable satisfaction of the sex drive** - preventing social disruption caused by sexual 'free-for-alls' e.g. STDs or teen pregnancy 2. **Reproduction of the next generation** 3. **Socialisation of the young** into society's shared norms + values 4. **Meetings its members' economic needs**

Answer 37

The family can perform many functions. The functions that it performs will depend on the needs of society. - Pre-industrial society = extended family - Industrial society = nuclear family As society changed, the 'type' of family that was required to help society function changed. Industrial society has two essential needs, which require a nuclear family to work: 1. A geographically mobile workforce 2. A socially mobile workforce

Answer 38

When men have a hard day of work, women will act as a "warm bath" taking care of sexual, environmental, economic needs

Answer 39

Found that women working had little impact on the division of labour as under 4% of fathers were the main child-carer

Answer 40

* Found that even where the wife was working and the husband was unemployed, she still did most of the housework. * Having lost their role as the main breadwinner, men resisted taking on a feminine domestic role

Answer 41

* Unit of consumption * The family is a prop to the capitalist system. The family consumes products produced by the bourgeouisie to make profits: * Keeping up with the Joneses' - advertisers urge families to consume latest products * Media target children who have 'pester power'

Answer 42

The family is nothing more than "an ideological conditioning device". Children learn to conform and become cooperative and exploited workers.

Answer 43

* Instrumental role (husband) * 'Breadwinner' * To achieve success at work * To provide financial support for the family * Expressive role (wife) * 'Home-maker' * Primary socialisation of the children * Meeting the family's emotional needs Parsons argues that this division of labour is based on biological differences, with women 'naturally' suited to the nurturing role. He claims the division of labour is beneficial to both men and women.

Answer 44

**Segregated conjugal roles** -> where the couple have separate roles; a male breadwinner and a female homemaker/carer (as in Parson's roles). Their leisure activities also tend to be separate. **Joint conjugal roles** -> where the couple share tasks such as housework and childcare and spend their leisure time together

Answer 45

Wives who do less housework No work -> 83% of housework Part-time -> 82% of housework Full-time -> 73% of housework Trend = more hours of work -> more help from husband

Answer 46

* Agrees with Gershuny but thinks the trend towards equality is linked to earning power (money). Suggests that until we have truly equal pay the divison of labour will remain unequal * Men working full-time = £27,300 Women working full-time = £20,592 **Difference per year = £6708 per month = £559 over a lifetime = £250,000**

Answer 47

Even when fathers are unemployed, they avoid housework. Connell calls this the 'crisis of masculinity'.

Answer 48

Found they were more likely than heterosexual couples to: - Share childcare and housework equally - Ascribe equal importance to their careers - View childcare positively Dunne thinks that inequality in division of labour arises because of deeply ingrained 'gender scripts' (norms and values about who does what in the home)

Answer 49

Violent incidents could be set off by what a husband saw as a challenge to his authority. Argue marriage legitimates violence against women.

Answer 50

- Domestic violence is the result of stress on family members cause by social inequality. Inequality means that some families have fewer resources - Those on low income or living in overcrowded accommodation are likely to experience higher levels of stress. This influences the risk of conflict and violence - Lack of money and time restricts people's social circle and reduces social support for those under stress - Not all people are equally in danger of domestic violence. Those with less power, status, wealth or income are often at greatest risk

Answer 51

Argues traditional relationships, roles and beliefs have lost their influence on individuals