Personal Life Perspective Flashcards
Although all of the five theories you have studied so far are very different, according to the personal life perspective what two weaknesses do they suffer from?
They tend to assume that the traditional nuclear family is the dominant family type. This ignores the increased diversity of families today.
They are all structural theories - they assume that families and their members are simply passive puppets manipulated by the structure of society to perform certain functions
Why do interactionist and postmodern perspectives reject the structural view?
Structural theories ignore the fact that we have some choice in creating our family relationships.
What is the personal life perspective?
A new perspective on families that is strongly influenced by interactionist ideas.
the PLP takes the ‘bottom up’ approach of interactionism. It emphasises the meanings that individual family members hold and how these shape their actions and relationships.
What do they say about understanding families?
to understand families, we must start from
the point of view of the individuals concerned and the
meanings they give to their relationships.
What is the PLP view on families?
takes a wider view of
relationships than just traditional ‘family’ relationships based on blood or marriage ties.
What different types of relationships / family do PLP identify?
• Relationships with friends who may be ‘like a sister or brother’ to you.
• Fictive kin: close friends who are treated as relatives, for example your mum’s best friend who you call ‘auntie”.
• Gay and lesbian ‘chosen families’ made up of a supportive network of close friends, ex-partners and others, who are not related by blood or marriage.
• Relationships with dead relatives who live on in people’s memories and continue to shape their identities and affect their actions.
• Even relationships with pets For example, Becky Tipper (2011) found in her study of children’s views of family
relationships, that children frequently saw their pets as part of the familv’
What can the PLP be accused of?
However, the personal life perspective can be accused of taking too broad a view. Critics argue that, by including a
wide range of different kinds of personal relationships, we ignore what is special about relationships that are based on
blood or marriage.
describe Nordavist and Smart’s research
For example, Petra Nordavist and Carol Smart’s (2014) research on donor-conceived children explores “what
counts as family when your child shares a genetic link with a ‘relative stranger but not with your partner?”
What did their study show?
Nordqvist and Smart’s study illustrates the value of the personal life perspective as compared with top down, structural approaches. It helps us to understand how people themselves construct and define their relationships as ‘family’, rather than imposing traditional sociological
definitions of the family (based on blood or genes, for
example) from the outside.
