The concept of the life course refers to the social processes shaping individuals’ journey through life, in particular their interaction with major institutions associated with the family, work, education, and leisure. The life course perspective distinguishes between trajectories on the one side and transitions on the other. The former refer to the sequence of roles
European societies during the nineteenth century underwent massive changes. The old social order anchored in kinship, the village, the community, religion, and old regimes was attacked and fell to the twin forces of industrialism and revolutionary democracy. The sweeping changes had particular effect on the family. There was a dramatic increase in such conditions as
Since the late 1970s the topic of family migration has increasingly been examined by sociologists, geographers, economists, and demographers. Studies of family migration have clearly become a wide ranging, interdisciplinary endeavor, with discussions cross cutting the social sciences. Although family migration occurs at many geographic scales, from the neighborhood to the global, academic discourses within
Many societies have made the transition from high mortality and large family sizes to settings where most children survive, small families are desired, and most people control their fertility. In the early 1960s, the average woman could expect to have almost five children over her life, but now she can expect to have fewer than
Within any society there are more or less common ways of ‘‘doing’’ family relationships. That is, there are ways of organizing family relationships which are broadly accepted as appropriate and given legitimacy in that society. This does not mean that all family relationships are similar or that all follow the same societally imposed ‘‘rules.’’ There
The implications of family structure for child wellbeing have been a central topic of research for several decades. In its simplest form, it is the comparison between two parent and one parent families that is the root of concern for child wellbeing. Children who live with two married parents are defined in most government statistics
Family theory consists of sets of propositions that attempt to explain some aspect of family life. Theorizing involves making general statements about some phenomenon, and an important characteristic of family theory, therefore, is that it involves a degree of abstraction from reality. Theoretical statements are abstract statements employing concepts that refer to things in the
Family therapy is a clinical approach to treating mental health and relationship problems based on the assumption that dysfunction can best be understood and treated by examining the social context in which it exists. Emerging as an identifiable ‘‘field’’ in the 1950s, family therapy was, and continues to be, characterized by attention to the interaction
From the earliest days of sociology, family and community have been central concerns of the discipline. The dense interpenetration of these two dimensions of life was associated in particular with simple societies. This is especially evident in the work of early social thinkers such as the German Ferdinand Tonnies and the Frenchman Frederick Le Play.
Although present since the nineteenth century, particularly in Marxist thinking (more specifically in Engels’s work), interest in family conflict within the sociology of family only really developed as a theme during the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1950s the dominant functionalist perspective tended to analyze the family in terms of internal equilibrium and its complementarity