Slide 1
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Sociology 640
Summary and Review
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Slide 2
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What is Family Sociology?
Study of complex set of relationships
between society, individuals, and
families.
Interested in both causes and
consequences of family behaviors.
Interested in causes and consequences at
both macro and micro levels.
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Slide 3
What does Family
Sociology contribute?
• Attempts to accurately describe trends/changes in
family behavior (e.g., emergence of nuclear family,
emergence of cohabitation).
• Recognizes complexity of factors influencing family
change/variation. Attempts to theoretically untangle
causal relationships (e.g., attitudes and divorce).
* Recognizes that correlation does not imply causation
(e.g., women’s education and marriage).
• Attempts to objectively assess implications of family
behavior and changes therein (e.g., impact of
divorce/stepfamilies on children).
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Slide 4
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General Trends
• Rapid & fundamental change in family behavior
since 1960s
• Changes are relatively universal
(across industrialized societies)
• Sometimes referred to as “second demographic
transition”
• Associated with much public concern
– Perceptions of family decline
– Concern about welfare of children
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Slide 5
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Selected aspects of change
• Marriage – later and perhaps less
• Divorce – stable at very high rates
• Cohabitation – from deviant to modal in a
short period of time
• Non-marital childbearing – very high
• Experience of single parent family living
greatly increased
• Increase in maternal employment
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Slide 6
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Hypothesized mechanisms of change
• Increasing economic independence for women
• Increasing economic instability for men
• Changing attitudes toward marriage, family,
consumption, life goals (increasing
individuation)
• Feedback loops (e.g., increasing divorce
contributes to later marriage, more cohabitation
in the next generation)
• Institutional changes (e.g., no-fault divorce)
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Slide 7
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Implications of change
• Implications for social/racial stratification
– family behavior strongly associated with economic well-being
• Implications for other dimensions of well-being
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(e.g., health)
• Implications for children’s well-being
– potential negative impact of family stability
• Implications for gender relations
– increasing similarity in men’s and women’s roles
• Implications for age structure of population
– Rapid aging of population is one of key issues of 21 st century
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Slide 8
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Methodological Issues – 1
• Increasing difficulty of defining outcomes of
interest – e.g., union formation
• Where does cohabitation fit in? Treatment of
cohab has huge impact on portrayal of change
• Increasing difficulty of defining race (observing
racial differences)
• Difficulty of separating influence of
race/ethnicity from influence of economic status
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Slide 9
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Methodological Issues – 2
• Difficulty of separating causal relationships
from selectivity
– General importance of selectivity in family
behavior
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• Difficulty of studying family behaviors in
isolation
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– Family behaviors often contingent on other
family behaviors
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• Strategies for dealing with these “chickenand-egg” issues
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Slide 10
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Methodological Issues – 3
• Sociologists’ limited ability to measure well what
we are really interested in
– e.g., attitudes, aspirations, personality, relationship
dynamics, peer influences, parenting stylesetc.
• Strategies to deal with this
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– Multiple measures, indices, qualitative data
• Importance of multivariate studies
– Need to control for confounding factors (e.g.,
predivorce conflict in studies of effect of divorce on
kids)
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Slide 11
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Social science challenging
popular perceptions
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Cohabitation did not emerge among the better educated
Cohabitation does not make marriages stronger
Cohabitation is not a childless state
Single mothers families are not all single mother
families (lots of cohabiting couples)
• Stepfamilies not always formed by remarriage of
formerly married parents
• Despite significantly worse outcomes for children in
single parent families, the vast majority of children in all
families don’t experience major problems
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Slide 12
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Policy and family behavior
• Examples of policies influencing family
behavior
• Examples of family behavior influencing
policy
• Responsiveness of family behavior to policy
• Possible policy measures to address existing
family “problems”
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Slide 13
Questions for thought (again)
• What does it mean to say the family is “in decline”?
• What do you think? Is the American family in decline?
Is it “evolving”?
• What about other countries you may know? What
about subgroups of the U.S. population?
• Is family change a bad thing? A good thing?
• What do you think have been the most important
reasons for family change between 1960 and 2000?
• Is “family decline” inevitable or can it be
slowed/stopped via policy measures?
• Can it be slowed/stopped via other mechanisms?
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