Unit 4: The Family
Introduction
Because people live in families we might assume that we know a lot about them. But the sociology
of the family shows that there are several types of family. Over a lifetime, each person will probably live in several different types of family as the family is changed by births, marriages, deaths, divorces and separations, remarriages, adoptions and changes of residence. In modern industrial societies such as the UK, over the last 50 years or so there has been an increase in the number and proportion of different types of family and a decline in nuclear families.
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Sociology is about how people interact with others in social groups. Those social groups come in many forms and sizes: nations, organisations of different kinds, communities, schools and so on. But perhaps the most important social group in our lives is our family. This unit explores the sociology of the family, looking at different kinds of families, family structures and patterns and at how roles and relationships in families are changing.
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What are the different types of family? The nuclear and extended family KEY TERMS
Household unit: the group of people living together in the same residence and sharing living space.
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THE NUCLEAR FAMILY A lot of sociological writing about the family in the 20th century took it for granted that there was one normal kind of family; the nuclear family. This was seen as the normal kind of family in the USA, the UK and other modern industrial societies at the time. It was thought to be both the most common kind of family and also the best. But from the 1970s onwards, other types of family became more noticeable. The functionalist George Murdock argued that the nuclear family of a mother, father and dependent children was the basic family unit worldwide. He based this claim on research carried out around the world on many different cultures and societies. Types of family that seemed to be different, he argued, had a nuclear family at their heart. For example, family units of mother, father and children exist within extended families.
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Nuclear family: made up of an adult man and an adult woman who are married, or in a relationship, and living together with dependent children.
This section describes the nuclear and extended family. Different family types include the reconstituted or stepfamily, the single-parent family and same sex family. Not everyone lives in a family; for example, sometimes groups of friends live together. A group of people living in the same home are called a household unit, whether or not they are related.
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Extended family: a nuclear family living with other relatives such as grandparents or greatgrandparents or aunts, uncles and cousins.
EXTENDED FAMILIES It is usually thought that extended families were more common in the past and are now in decline because they seem less suited to life in modern industrial societies. Extended families include more relatives than the mother, father and children unit of the nuclear family. If there are more than two generations this is called a vertically extended family. If there are aunts, uncles and cousins (that is, people of the same generation as the parents and children) this is a horizontally extended family. Sometimes the term extended family is used for all the relatives sharing a household, that is, living together under one roof. Sometimes, however, we call several nuclear families living close to each other in the same street or area extended families. These are both classic extended families and seem to have been common in working-class British communities in the past. In modern industrial Š Cambridge University Press 2014
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