Families Exam Prep Flashcards
Family
Family is defined as any combination of two or more persons who are bound together over time
Nuclear Family
Traditional family unit, mom and dad and kid.
Extended Family
Family consisting of all relatives (parents, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins) often used in a more limited sense to define a family structure in which a
married couple and their children share a household with parents
Dual Income Family
Both partners work, family has two sources of income
Consumer Family
a family in which the husband was the exclusive provider and the head of the household, while the wife was the homemaker for whom products were manufactured to help create a comfortable home for the family
Technological Family
new technologies make it possible to conceive a baby without sexual intercourse
Orientation Family
A family that you are born into (mom,dad,siblings)
Functions of the Family (Six)
-Physical maintenance of group
● Procreation or adoption
● Social control of members
● Nurturance and love
● Socialisation of children
● Production, consumption and distribution of goods and services
Future Trends in the Canadian Family (The transition)
○ Access to money made women less dependent on men
○ Dual income families
○ Both spouses work full time
○ More common that couples had fewer or no children (legal birth control)
○ Divorce Act 1968 - more lenient guidelines
○ Same sex parents
Hunter Gatherer Societies
● Societal structure driven by a daily quest for food
● Division of responsibly between men and women
● Men - make tools and hunt
● Women - gathered fruits, nuts, small animals, childbearing, nurturing
● Women held high status - men loved them for producing children
● Women consumed 2⁄3 more calories than the group
○ Because of their role as child bearers - women were essential to survival
Agricultural Families
● The change from H-G societies to agricultural society noticed a shift in the family
● No longer nomadic peoples
● Because they grew their own food and raised their own animals no longer had to go out
on a quest for them, therefore settlements began
● Increase in manual labour meant you needed more people to farm and raise animals
● Larger families
Urban Industrial Families
● Family became consumer based and not production based
● Wage labour
● Factory work
● Emergence of cities
● Smaller families
● Industrial Nuclear Family (Mother, Father, Children
● Notion of motherhood (worked at home and raised children) and were financially
dependent
● Witness a shift in status of women
● Men were wage earners
● Children went to school and were no longer needed to work on farms
Pre-industrial Families
● Cottage Industry - commerce, technology, and crafts developed in popularity
● Merchants and artisans began to work at home when their wives and children could help
● People began to have fewer children because life in towns and cities did not sustain a
large number of people
Contemporary Canadian Family
● Ideal family life of the traditional nuclear family in the first half of the century depended
on
○ Women accepting the role as wife and mother
○ Men accepting the role as provider and earning enough to support the whole
family
○ THEN, family has had to adapt to new political economic and social pressures of
life
Structural Functionalism
● The oldest sociological theory - used by anthropologists
● Macro approach, broad focus on social structures that shape society
● Functionalists believe that everything and everybody in society has a function that allows
society run smoothly
● Roles are all interdependent - they need each other
● Looks at how society is organised to perform its required functions
● Social change can upset the balance in society
Status
a position within a social group
Roles
Set of expected behaviours within a status
Norms
The most prevalent behaviours in a society
Systems Theory
● Examines how family members interact as a system, a set of different parts that work
together and influence one another, the goal is to maintain stability
● Family systems have complex organisations
● A change in one member causes change in all members
● Messages and rules shape members, prescribe and limit a members’ behaviour over
time, they are sometimes explicit and often very implicit “be responsible” “do unto
others..”
Symbolic Interactionism
● Emphasises the mental process of perception and interpretation in determining the
behaviour of individuals
● Looks at how individuals behave based on their perceptions of themselves and others
● People define and interpret their experiences in the social world to give them meaning
● It is this meaning that matters, not the social facts
● Mental processes are not visible, only the actions that follow
● Charles Cooley - “I am not what I think I am. I am not what you think I am. I am what I
think you think I am”
● An individual develops a two part “self”
○ Me (objective qualities, concrete things, i.e., tall, teacher, athlete)
Exchange Theory
● Making choices based on costs & benefits
● Maximise benefits (physical/emotional security, access to goods & services, & social
approval) & minimise costs (providing the aforementioned)
● Individuals know what they have to offer and what they need
● Social roles are stable when the exchange is equal; benefits = costs
● Benefits and costs are based on perceptions, not facts
Conflict Theory
● A sociological/political theory that examines how ‘power’ holds society together
● Conflict exists because of inequities in power (the ability to control the behaviour of
other)
● Used to criticise rather than explain
● Society is organised into groups to divide people according to their power, groups
compete to meet their needs, competition can result in exploitation (i.e, oppression in the
U.S., Karl Marx
● Developed in the 19th century when inequities were great
● Often used for analysing power and authority within the family
● E.g., Men worked for the money in the family, women worked at home (unpaid labour)
● Men had all of the power (and money) in the household and women had no choice but to
marry and have children
Feminist Theory
● Social and political theories that examine the impact of sex and gender on behaviour, look at the family is an exploitative institution
Examine at Bias
● Androcentricity: bias that assumes that male behaviour is human behaviour
● Double Standard: biases that apply different standards for evaluating the behaviour of
men and women
