Trends and Theories: Vocabulary & Family Structures

Trends and Theories: Vocabulary

• Breadwinner: The family member whose income is the primary source of support.
• Structure: The organization and relationship between complex elements.
• Status: The relative social or professional standing of an individual.
• Predictable: Able to be known or declared in advance.
• Awareness: Knowledge and understanding of current happenings or existence.
• Theory: A supposition or system of ideas intended to explain something, based on general principles.

Chapter 1 Overview

• Family scientists and sociologists describe, explain, and predict family-based social patterns in the United States and other countries. These researchers aid in understanding social and personal trends in families.

Family Structures

• Family structures common a century ago are now less prevalent.
• In the U.S. around 1900, most families consisted of three generations living in one home and engaged in manual labor.
• Today, most families are either nuclear (parents and their biological or adopted children) or blended, and the nuclear family is mostly preferred.
• A single-parent family consists of one parent and his/her biological or adopted children, due to unwed motherhood, divorce, or spousal death.
• A blended family is created by remarriage, including at least one child from a prior relationship.
• Extended family includes all relatives beyond the nuclear or blended family level.
• Marriage rates have decreased overall in included countries since 1920-2018. Trends in divorce rates are more nuanced, varying greatly by country. Differences are likely due to delays in marriage, differences in divorce rates across cohorts, and female employment in the workforce.

Family Functions

• Functional Theorists identify common and nearly universal family functions.

Economic Support

• Economic support is the most common function of families today. The ways this support manifests can differ across cultures. An example is the pattern of Italian immigrants in Quebec and Montreal who help family and friends emigrate from Italy to Canada. Those who participate support others in the same manner.

Emotional Support

• Emotional relationships are also significant. There's immense cultural variety in how intimacy is experienced among families globally. Intimacy encompasses social, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and physical trust that is mutually shared.

Socialization

• Children have the potential to communicate, work cooperatively, and socialize.
• The family is the core of primary socialization, although other institutions also contribute to the process.
• From birth, children are socialized as parents, family, and friends transmit mainstream society's culture and their family's culture to the newborn.
• Social construction of reality is developed as children are assisted, which is what people define as real because of their background assumptions and life experiences with others.
• Children typically grow up through predictable life stages: infancy, preschool, school years, young adulthood, adulthood, middle adulthood, and later-life adulthood.
• Primary socialization begins at birth and continues until the school years, molding the newborn to meet society's expectations and is facilitated by family, friends, caretakers, and media.
• Secondary socialization occurs in later childhood and adolescence through schooling and non-family influences, running alongside primary socialization. While parents accept their children unconditionally, children in schools must get the acceptance of teachers and classmates by performance and conformity.

Socialization in Adolescence and Adulthood

• As students, children have to learn to belong and cooperate in large groups.
• Friends, classmates, and peer increase their importance in secondary education.
• Most 0-5 year olds desire approval and affection from family, but by pre-teen years, they seek it from peers because they want autonomy.
• Parents maintain some influence by influencing their children's peers.
• The third level of socialization includes marriage, work, college, significant relationships, and adult roles.
• As adults assume roles, there is adaptation to meet the needs and wants throughout the course of adult life. People follow the pattern used when they were younger to find out what is expected.

Sexuality and Reproductive Control

• Families have traditionally asserted reproductive and sexuality control.
• Although a few centuries ago, parents chose spouses for their children, in Western cultures, they want adult children to choose their spouses.
• Older family members may encourage pregnancy and childbirth only in marriage or long-term relationships.
• Unmarried mothers face concerns about economic, social, emotional, and other forms of support.
• When an unmarried mother gives both, older female family members are more likely to support the child instead of the both father.
• From 2000-2006, there is a slight decline in teen births, while older women's unwed births increased, which implies lesser control by sanctioning childbirth within marriage has been seen across families.

Out-Of-Wedlock Childbirths

• Since the 1960's, out-of-wedlock childbirths are common but have variations in and among societies.

Influences On Out-Of-Wedlock Childbirths

• Modern birth method, along with increasing economic independence, has give women more control over family planning. In 25 territories, it is typically around 1 percent; such as in China and India. In another 25 countries, more than 60 percent of the births are out-of-wedlock.

Implications of Childbirths Outside of Marriage

• Ranges from severe punishments and ostracism to celebrations and government assistance. Governments are unable to respond to the trend. The rates often coincide responses. It is also noted marriage has become less necessary for "women's financial survival, social interaction, and personal wellbeing.

Living Arrangements

Status

• Ascribed status is present at birth and unchanging (race, sex, or class).
• Master status is one that stands out and distracts others from seeing who one really is.
• People are born into social networks that include cultural, racial, and economic statuses. Achieved Status in modern societies Is more important than ascribed status. Status is the position within a social group, whereas role is how one enacts that status.

Role Strain and Role Conflict

• Role strain puts a burden onto someone because of various roles within a given status.
• Role conflict is experienced when roles in a single status come into conflict with roles in another status.

Groups

• A group consists of two or more people who share a common identity, interact regularly, have shared expectations, and function in mutually agreed upon roles. Sociologists define these groups as aggregates. In family science, some of those groups studied are family units.

Categories

• Categories are a number of people who share common characteristics, like eye color, clothing, and political association. It is not necessary to all share the same space or expectations.

Types of Groups

• Dyads are groups with 2 people.
• Triads are groups with 3 people, and each additional person creates more relations.

Group Relationships

• Primary groups are small, intimate as well as informal.
• Secondary groups are more formal, and larger.

Historical Changes in the Family

• Industrial Revolution began some changes as husbands were called to leave as breadwinners. As such, women were called to be homemakers. Service based lowered what is required as "clean house"

Concerns For Family Structure

• High rates of divorce are major concerns for family structure disintegration. Understanding the factors of the divorce can enhance satisfaction and the overall quality of marriage.

The Industrial Revolution

• The Industrial Revolution shifted families such that Sociology and Family Science studied how families changed.
• Before the Industrial Revolution, every member of family living on smaller farms worked to sustain the family, whereas towns were smaller and similar with large families.
• After the Industrial Revolution, farm work became factory work as men left to work, and standards of living increased as women became supervisors.

Unpaid Work

• Unpaid work Is not valued as much as work

Western Civilization Impact

• All of Western civilization was impacted post the industrial revolution. Including, deplorable city and living conditions, high illness rates, and poverty.

Family Organizations

• The American Sociological Association (ASA) is the largest of professional sociology organizations in the world.
• The mission statement: "Many of history's most pressing problems are related/rooted in the family."

NCFM

• The National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) Provide an education forum, and establish professional standards.

Family Culture

• All families share cultural traits. Each also has its own culture of uniqueness. Family's also have diversity in culture but are not biologically determined. When most couples learn to marry, its is generally formed on a new version for their own culture.

Negative Judgements

• People are inclined to judge based on differences. Ethnocentrism is to judge based on prior experiences of our own cultures.

Cultural Relativism

• A valuable perspective for understanding more about difference cultures is called cultural relativism, this to look for the cultural difference in which differences in cultures occur. The person should appreciate the culture even from spectators point of view.

Opportunity

• Class is determined by either where they are born or adopted in the world.

Life Chances

• Life chances, as identified by Max Weber, are access to basic opportunities and resources in the marketplace.

Understanding Life Chances

• Understanding life chances increases awareness from trends of the broad social picture.

Demography

• Famliy contains a influential underpinning that influences on the larger social and personal levels. Demography is defined as the study of scientific population growth and change. Everything of society influences population.

Changing trends

• During the two decades after War World 2. Marriage, and child bearing most in western nations: couples had children and quickly got married.

Baby Boom

• Started in 1946, women got married younger, there more one child after another. The children born from 1946-1964 were called the Baby Boom Generation. 78 millions are still alive today.
• Contributing Factors to Change : Millions deaths from war, deep shifts towards conservative values all were contributors.

Generations X,Y

• Boomers had kids and belonged to generation X and Y.

Core Study Components

• Births, death, migration. (Births-Deaths) +/- ((In-Migration)-(Out Migration)) = Population Change. (Births-Deaths) natural increase the formula equals all births minus all deaths over s given time in population.

((In-Migration)-(Out Migration))

• is all in-migration minus all out-migration. Industrial set revolution in motion to surger births .

Making Sense of Abstract Theories

Theories clarifies and magnifies understandings of families. In statistics theories are an unscientific exercise.

Theories Conduct

If it findings are supportive, studies are performed to fine tune. If findings don't support the theory, made assumptions are revisited. Theories are used to study millions in a country,macro theories. Study small groups micro theories.

Symbolic Interactionism Theory

• Society is composed to individuals of shared symbols and their meanings.

Usefulness

• Useful in improving communication, understanding cross-cultural and understanding other people relations.

Realization of Individuals

• begin to understand how to resolve misunderstanding communicate better. Three words:LOVE, LUST, LAIR.

Symbolic Interactionism

• Makes it easy to become a student. Daily interactions with professors.

Thomas Therom

• Theorem says people perceive something of real then it really become real in its consequences. Example women with HIV and made funeral plans then was tested to be false however still changed lives. What one defines as seemingly real then it is irrespective to factors and matter.

Major Realizations

• Understand people in live, is operate from different.

Approaching in Common

• Approaching a Common ground the person symbols was in 1913. Statement "All I was doing at try in to get home from work". Her Actions that involved the leadership of others King, so statements so meaningful.

Theories Developed For The Family

• Developed to the need of family settings and to help family. Family Systems: Developmental, Social Exchange, Ecological, and Feminist.

Family Systems

• very powerful. Family systems are collection subsystems. Like a computer system to diagnose. This theory consider of malfunctions and complex groups