Family Diversity

8 Key excerpts on "Family Diversity"

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  The Family

  • Liz Steel, Warren Kidd, Anne Brown(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Researchers have also adopted an unquestioning heteronormative stance in their attempts to understand and explain family life. Exercise 8.3 Look at the list of terms used by sociologists to describe different types of family K U I A structure. With how many of them are you familiar? Do you know what they all mean? Try to put together a set of definitions for all of them. Look up any you do not know in textbooks and sociological dictionaries. It should also be noted that thinking about Family Diversity in this way is largely Eurocentric – i.e. biased in terms of the Western industrial experience. Here are some definitions to help you get started; the family is a social group characterized by common residence, economic coop-eration and reproduction. It includes adults of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or more children, own or adopted, of the sexually cohabiting couple. (Murdock 1949) a group of persons directly linked by kin connections, the adult members of which assume responsibility of caring for the children. (Giddens 1993) All the people we are related to by blood or marriage, the family of origin is the family we are born into. (Lawson and Garrod 2009) Gay and lesbian households As you worked through Exercise 8.3, you may well have been thinking about whether blood ties between members of families are the most important relationships or bonds. For instance, we now have legally recognized civil partnerships in the form of same-sex marriage in many countries, as diverse as Netherlands and South Africa. In addition, there are many countries in which gay couples can legally register their ‘civil partnerships’ (Ice-land, Hungary, etc. – see Badgett 2009). Where there is no legal recognition of same-sex Family Diversity 143 marriage, as in most of the United States, homosexual couples are more likely to want the opportunity to marry than their European counterparts (Badgett 2009).

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  Empowerment Series: Social Work with Groups

  Comprehensive Practice and Self-Care

  • Charles Zastrow, Sarah Hessenauer(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  They may also need counseling themselves (or support from a self-help group) to assist in coping with them when she is drinking. LO 1 Describe the Diversity of Family Forms DIVERSITY OF FAMILY FORMS The family is a social institution that is found in every culture. The U.S. Census defines family as a group of two or more persons related by blood, marriage, or adoption. 2 It should be noted that such a definition does not cover a number of living arrangements in which the members consider themselves to be a family, such as: ● A husband and wife raising two foster children who have been in the household for several years ● Two lesbians in a loving relationship, who are raising children born to one of the partners in a previous heterosexual marriage ● A man and a woman who have been living together for years in a loving relationship but have never legally married A broader definition of family that encompasses all of the above is as follows: a family is a kinship system of all relatives living together or recognized as a social unit. 3 Such a definition recognizes unmarried same-sex and opposite-sex couples and families, foster families, children being raised by grandparents, and any rela-tionship that functions or feels like a family. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 267 Describe the Diversity of Family Forms A wide diversity of family patterns exists in the world. Families in different cultures take a variety of forms. In some societies, the husband and wife live in separate buildings.

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  Progress of the World's Women 2019-2020

  Families in a Changing World

  • United Nations Women(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • United Nations Women

    (Publisher)

  3 Against this backdrop, this chapter documents change, continuity and diversity in families and households across countries and regions in an effort to provide a solid empirical grounding for policies that promote gender equality and women’s empowerment regardless of the kind of family they live in. What does diversity mean in the context of family life? On the one hand, it refers to the reality that, over their life-course, individuals belong to various households and families and have changing roles, entitlements and obligations within them. 4 On the other hand, Family Diversity acknowledges differences in the organization of families over time as well as across societies at a specific moment. 5 While the focus here is mostly on the latter meaning, both aspects of Family Diversity are relevant for gender equality. Why does family change and diversity matter for women’s rights? This chapter answers this question by analysing the available data on four aspects of family life: conjugal relations, fertility, household composition and ageing. What it shows is that the impact of these domains of family life on gender equality is complex and context-specific. 6 For example, the extent to which marriage or motherhood are considered to be a woman’s destiny in a given society can shape the rights women have in forming and exiting their preferred partnerships and whether or not they bear any children. In turn, demographic change—especially with regards to fertility and ageing—has consequences for how women and men allocate their time between paid work and care responsibilities. And household composition and size have an impact on women’s well-being and access to resources. For instance, lone-parent households tend to be poorer than two-parent households because they often lack the additional resources of an adult partner who lives in the same household (see Chapter 4).

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  The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Families

  • Jacqueline Scott, Judith Treas, Martin Richards, Jacqueline Scott, Judith Treas, Martin Richards(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  In the US the numbers are even larger. Estimates are that, of those children born in the 1980s, 35 percent will live in a stepfamily before age 18 (Glick, 1989). The comparatively higher rate of breakdown of stepfamilies means that many children will go on to experience multiple family transitions. Nearly one in five children in a New Zealand cohort had experienced three or more households by age 9 (Fergusson, Horwood, and Shannon, 1984). These two features, instability and diversity, exist in contexts that contribute to their pervasiveness, since they represent the often creative efforts by individuals to adapt to social and economic change. Accompanying structural diversity, too, are changes in internal family dynamics that both cause, and are a result of, social change. In this chapter we will consider first why Family Diversity has increased, emphasizing particularly the importance of the social, cultural, and legal context. The second part of the chapter turns to the implications of family change for family members. This is a controversial and politicized area, and we begin by first consider-ing some of the methodological and conceptual issues and assumptions that have characterized the research enterprise before moving on to present some of the key research findings addressing the implications of divorce and separation for adults and children. We conclude with a discussion of the ways in which further research and understanding of family change might inform family life and policies concerned with it. The Context of Family Change Divorce is one of several major transitions that family members may experience. These transitions do not occur in a vacuum, but take place in legal, historical, cultural, and social contexts that form a framework within which they can be understood. It is important to remember that family structures and relationships have always been subject to change, and that children have always faced the risk of losing one or both parents.

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  Family Health

  A Holistic Approach to Social Work Practice

  • John T. Pardeck, Francis K. O. Yuen, John T. Pardeck, Francis K. O. Yuen(Authors)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  7 Family Health and Cultural Diversity Francis K. O. Yuen The family health social work approach considers culture and cultural diversity as integral parts of its theoretical and practice frameworks. Al- though different cultures have specific meanings and practice for the notion of health and family, the attainment of the well-being of the fam- ily and its members appears to be a common goal across cultures. Cultural diversity in social work is based on the idea that the United States is a multicultural society and that different cultural beliefs and practices should be taken into consideration in social work interventions. This orientation of cultural relativity supports the notion that there is no "one size fits all" social work assessment and intervention approach. Instead, interventions have to be tailored to fit the clients' cultural con- text; clients' perceptions and meanings of events and issues, along with other personal, social, economic, and environmental factors, play impor- tant roles in the formation and implementation of social work interven- tions. Human diversity or cultural diversity calls for social workers to formulate differential and culturally appropriate interventions in working with clients of diverse backgrounds. In general usage, cultural diversity, cultural pluralism, and multicul- turalism are terms that are used almost interchangeably. Practically and academically, each has specific connotations. Cultural diversity, also re- 102 Family Health ferred to as human diversity, suggests the acknowledgment of the exis- tence of people of different cultures. People who accept cultural diversity do not remain culturally apathetic and become aware of different cul- tures. Cultural pluralism implies the recognition, intention, and practice of working with people with different backgrounds. It involves the growth from cultural awareness to cultural sensitivity and the ability to effectively communicate cross-culturally.

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  The Role of Gender in Practice Knowledge

  Claiming Half the Human Experience

  • Josefina Figueira McDonough, F. Ellen Netting, Ann Nichols Casebolt, Josefina Figueira McDonough, F. Ellen Netting, Ann Nichols Casebolt(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Unit One: Defining Family: Contested Terrain. A review of diverse understandings of family, and an introduction to concept of social construction.

  Selected Readings from: Thorne & Yalom (1982). Rethinking the family; Fine (1993). Current approaches to understanding Family Diversity; Gross (1992). Are families deteriorating or changing?; Flax (1982). The family in contemporary thought; Stacey (1990). Brave new families.

  Unit Two: Theorizing Family. A review and critique of dominant family theories in historical context.

  Selected Readings from: Burr et al. (1979). Contemporary theories about the family; Ingoldsby and Smith (1995). Families in multicultural perspective; Carter and McGoldrick (1989). The changing family life cycle; Cheal (1991). Family and the state of theory; Coates (1992). Ideology and education for social work practice; Ferree (1990). Beyond separate spheres.

  Unit Three: The Social Construction of Family: Cultural, Historical, and Political Perspectives.

  Selected Readings from: Gittens (1985). The family in question; Mintz and Kellogg (1988). Domestic revolutions; Jones (1984). Labor of love, labor of sorrow; Baber and Allen (1992). Women and families; Baca Zinn (1990). Family, feminism, and race in America; Collier and Yanagisako (1987). Gender and kinship; Jennings and Waller (1990). Constructions of social hierarchy; Weedon (1987). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory.

  Unit Four: Extending Family: Learning from Diverse Constructions of Family and Challenging "-isms."

  Selected Readings from: Carter (1988). Remarried families; Depoy and Noble (1992). The structure of lesbian relationships in response to oppression; Weston (1991). Families we choose;

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  Sociology

  The Essentials

  • Margaret Andersen, Margaret Andersen, Howard Taylor(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. CHAPTER 13 Families and Religion 333 Diversity among Contemporary American Families Today, the family is one of the most rapidly changing of all of society’s institutions. Families are sys- tems of social relationships that emerge in response to social conditions that, in turn, shape the future direction of society. There is no static or natural form for the family. Change and variation in families are social facts. Among other changes, families today are smaller than in the past. There are fewer births, and they are more closely spaced, although these characteristics of families vary by social class, region of resi- dence, race, and other factors. With longer life expectancy, childbearing and child rearing now occupy a smaller fraction of parents’ adult life. During earlier periods, death (often from childbirth) was more likely to claim the mother than the father of small children. Men in the past would have been more likely than now to raise children on their own after the death of a spouse. That trend is now reversed: Women are now more likely to be widowed with children, and death, once the major cause of early family disruption, has been replaced by divorce (Cherlin 2010; Rossi and Rossi 1990). Demographic and structural changes have resulted in great diversity in family forms. Married couples now make up a smaller proportion of households than was true even thirty years ago. Single-parent households have increased dramatically. Divorced and never-married people make up a larger proportion of the population. Overall, married-couple families make up about half of all households. Single-parent households (typically headed by women), post-childbearing couples, gay and lesbian couples, childless households, and single people are increasingly common (U.S. Census Bureau 2016a).

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  An Introduction to Sociology

  • Ken Browne(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  Shared households and ‘families of choice’ For those who have finally left their family home, shared households are becoming much more common, particularly among young people. There may often be a greater loyalty among young people to their friends than to their family. Such shared households, where people choose to live and form relationships with a group of people with whom they have closer relations than with their families of birth, have therefore sometimes been called ‘families of choice’. Such households may involve shared domestic life (cooking, eating and socializing together), and shared leisure, sporting activities and holidays.

  These households and families are on the increase because of the high costs of buying or renting houses, the growing numbers of young people entering higher education, and the desire of young people to explore alternative living arrangements rather than simply settling down into a conventional couple household.

  Conclusion on Family Diversity

  This section has suggested that it is very misleading to assume that the cereal-packet image of the conventional family represents the reality of family life in Britain. Only a small minority of families are of this type. It is much more realistic to recognize that families and households are constantly changing. There is a wide diversity, or variety, of family types and household relationships in contemporary Britain. Trends suggest there will be growing numbers of extended, dual-earner, reconstituted, cohabiting, gay and lesbian, and lone-parent families, and more single-person households.

  Figure 3.6 summarizes the various forms of family and household types you might consider as making up the patterns of Family Diversity in contemporary Britain, some of which will be explored later in the chapter.

  SOCIAL CHANGE AND FAMILY TYPES, STRUCTURES AND RELATIONSHIPS

  Many of the forms of Family Diversity considered above have arisen from a series of social changes which have led to shifts in family structure and organization. Social changes have also affected relationships between family members. These changes will now be examined.

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