Marriage, Divorce and Family Diversity Flashcards
Since the 1970s has there been an increase in the number of marriages?
What are the sociological explanations for this?
Who coined the ‘pure relationship’?
What is another trend within the marriage institution?
What is the fastest growing family type?
-NO. Marriage between men and women is at the lowest ever.
-Secularisation: The declining importance of religion in society has reduced the stigma associated with cohabiting, meaning people feel less need to get married.
-Divorce rates: Increased divorce rates may have put people off.
-Expense: The average wedding now cost over £27,000
-The Pure relationship: Giddens argues that people today are searching for the perfect relationship and always imagine there might be something better.
-Another trend is people are getting married much later. The average to get married for men is 37 and 35 women. Up from 29-26(1974).
-Cohabiting couples are the fastest growing type.
What are the criticism of sociological explanations for marriage trends? Secularisation? Pure relationship? Cohabitation?
-Secularisation: Only 30% of weddings in the UK today are religious ceremonies. As such it is not clear that secularisation would necessarily have had a profound impact on the number of marriages, as civil weddings have also decreased.
-Gidden’s pure relationship explains why people are prepared to get divorced and not to remarry more than why people do not marry in the first place.
-Cohabitation is not necessarily an alternative to marriage: often is a ‘trial run’. Over 80% of marriages in the UK are between couple who have previously lived as a cohabiting couple.
What happened following the 1969 Divorce Act?
What did it enable?
What are the reasons for rapid increase in divorce?
-There was a significant number of divorces.
-This legislation made it equally easy for women and men to initiate a divorce and remove the need to prove that someone was ‘at fault’.
-Reasons for rapid increase in divorce include:
-Legislative change
-Secularisation
-Female emancipation
-Child support
-The pure relationship
What do statistics for divorce not reveal?
-Whilst it is clear that legislation changes have impacted the rate of divorce, it is less clear whether they have impacted the rate of marital breakdown. This is because statistics on separation are much less readily available than those on divorce. Indeed, there are no records at all of empty shell marriages where people continue to live together for the sake of children, propriety or the difficulty and expense of divorce.
-As such it is also difficult to determine the true impact of the other suggested explanations.
What is the difference between childbearing and childrearing?
How do the key changes in marriage and divorce link to changes in this? What % of women will never have children? What % of children are born outside of marriage? What is the continuation of these trends linked to?
-Childbearing is having children and child rearing is bringing them up.
-The changes are seen in:
-Women are having children later(links to delayed marriage and focus on careers).
-Women are having fewer children (closely linked to the above).
-A higher proportion of women are choosing not to have children at all (approx 25% will never)
-More than 40% of children are born outside marriage(links to decline in marriage and increase in cohabitation).
-These trends seem to continue and are linked to secularisation and the changing role of women.
What was fixed regarding the lives of people particularly women? How?
Who coined the personal life perspective? What did She argue?
What did Stacey argue? Who recognised a new dominating family type which showcase a reliance on traditional family structure?
-People in the past particularly women had a fixed life course.
-Traditionally people, lived with their parents until they got married, at which point women would live with their husbands and bring up children.
-Carol Smart and her personal life perspective suggests that people today are much more able to influence their life course rather than have it determined for them.
-Smart argued people today spend much more of their life outside traditional family structures.
-Stacey suggests women are now able to choose the family structures that suit them, including with people who are not actually related e.g. the families of previous partners.
-Chester’s neo-conventional families (couples with children)
What range of family types do sociologists identify in contemporary society ?(16 total)
-Traditional nucelar family, Symmetrical family, Nuclear family with house husband, Extended family, Beanpole family, Matrifocal lone-parent family, Patrifocal lone-parent family.
-Reconstructed family, Same-sex couples, Living apart together, Grandparenting, Singledom, Flatmates/housemates, Empty nest family, Boomerang family.
(1993) What 5 ways did the Rappoport suggest the modern family was diverse?
-Organisational diversity: Families are organised in a range of ways in terms of the roles people perform and the structures they take.
-Cultural diversity: I.e. Afro-Caribbean families are more likely to be matrifocal. Some Asian households more likely to be extended.
-Social class diversity: Family structure and child rearing practices are influenced by social class. I.e. statistics show divorce rates are more common among those on lower incomes.
-Life stage diversity: People living in a range of different family forms throughout their lives. They might be born into a nuclear family, live on their own, share with housemates, become a cohabiting couple, become a nuclear family, get divorced, form a reconstituted family, etc.
-Generational diversity: Different generations have different attitudes to family life. For example, older generations might be more traditional, preferring the nuclear family.
What sociological approaches tend to view family diversity as a positive feature of contemporary society? Who disagrees?
What did Charles Murray argue? Melanie Phillips?
What do other sociologists point out to criticise Phillips?
-Postmodernist and feminists.
-The New Right take a different view.
-Murray argues that welfare payments to lone parents provide perverse incentives to young girls to get pregnant and to boys not to take responsibility for their children, contributing to the creation of an underclass of long-term unemployed and dysfunctional people.
-Melanie Phillips argued that the riots and violence that swept London (2011) was the fault of lone-parent families and boys who lacked male role models.
-Other sociologists point out that people from a range of family backgrounds rioted and parents staying together does not guarantee a positive role model.
Why do some sociologists argue that modern family diversity is overstated?
Who argue the idea of a ‘neo-conventional’ family? Why?
-Single-person households and lone-parent families remained minorities and most aspired to live in neo-conventional families.
-Statistics bear this out with married or civil partnership couples, followed by cohabiting couples being by far the most common households.
-Chester- a functionalist argued that most families are essentially nuclear in form: ‘neo-conventional’. In other words, people live in households with two adults and 2 children, regardless of whether the adults are married, whether both are ‘birth parents’ of the children or indeed what gender they are.
