Personal life Flashcards
What is personal life?
An alternative way of studying family
Has emerged recently and focuses on the research of meanings that individuals give to life choices, events and decisions
What is a life course?
Events that take place throughout an individuals life and how they assign meaning to them
Example of a life course?
1) Born into a nuclear family
2) Adult children leave home and start a heterosexual relationship
3) Get married
4) Have children and begin a nuclear family
What does Hareven say about the life course?
Roles and relationships within families change as our life course evolves
What does Green say about the life course?
No fixed common path through life course in contemporary society
Meaning our life course isn’t any less significant
-For example increase in LAT relationships, increase in children out of wedlock, same sex couples and boomerang children
-In a constant state of change
Carol Smart- why should we study personal life and not family?
More specific to individuals, people will listen and be more honest because when we study family its a collective
What is Carol Smarts theory?
Priority of bonds between people, importance of memory and cultural heritage
-The significance of emotions, how family secrets work and change overtime and underestimate importance of shared possession or home in the maintenance and memory of relationship
-Draws attention to personal and intimate relationship even if they aren’t conventional defined as family
Smart- what are other types of relationships we can study?
-Friends like siblings
-Fictive kin (close friends like relatives)
-Gay and lesbian chosen families
-Relationships with dead relatives
-Relationships with pets (Becky Tipper) did study of children’s views of family relationships, that children frequently say their pets as part of the family
What does Misztal believe?
Understanding family life by exploring peoples memory, peoples values shaped what’s remembered
These memory’s that provide important information about family relationships and that they are used to create and reinforce bonds as well as change identity’s
-Important when studying the family to ask about memories in family life, people remember different things in the family
-Memory guided by videos, pictures and letters
What does Ruttins believe?
Research should focus on biography
Means creating photos, videos and objects from the home to create history of someones life and relationship
Helps us understand what relationship means
What does Gillis say?
Create our own family identity, may become important to us then the reality of family life
Refers the families we live with and these we live by
People us social media to create image of family life
These can be far from reality but their based on the personal life they want to have
What does Carsten say?
More people are favoring the chosen family members rather than seeing biological relatedness as primary significance
What does Carsten mean by rationality?
The relationship that defines us as individuals are less likely to be based on science and law
What does Carsten mean by chosen family’s?
First emerged amongst the LGBTQ+ community’s but are now becoming, increasingly popular amongst all
