I. General trends and patterns:
1. Long term and recent trends in age at marriage
2. Long term and recent trends in divorce
3. Long term and recent trends in childbearing (marital and non-marital)
4. Recent trends in cohabitation (where does cohabitation fit into the family
formation process)
5. Recent trends in women’s labor force participation
6. Recent changes in distribution of domestic work
II. General sociological emphases
1. General sociological emphasis on interactive relationships between broader
social/economic/cultural forces and individual behavior
2. Scientific approach to study of family – role of theory, hypotheses, data
3. Central emphasis on averages and variation – allows sociologists to make
conclusions/generalizations
4. Who cares? What is the relevance of understanding how family behavior has
changed or how family outcomes vary across groups?
III. Prominent theoretical emphases in family Sociology
1. What are the explanations offered for observed differences in family behavior
over time or across groups?
a. Changing economic circumstances
b. Changing roles of men and women within the family
c. Changing attitudes
d. Changing policies
e. etc.
2. How are these broader social changes linked, theoretically, to variation in family
outcomes?
3. What are the important factors thought to influence family behavior at the
individual level?
4. How have sociologists evaluated the relevance of the various explanations for
family change and individual patterns of family behavior?
5. What kind of evidence has been found to support (or not support) these various
theoretical relationships at both the aggregate level and the individual level?
IV. Key terms
1. “Family decline”
2. Comparative advantage
3. Gains to marriage
4. Gender role specialization
5. “Marriage protection”
6. Wage premium to marriage
7. Second Shift
8. Leisure Gap
9. The stalled revolution
10. “Doing gender” or “gender display”
11. Gender ideologies
12. Hypothetical cohort measure
13. Selection bias
14. “Trial’ marriage
15. Homogamy/Heterogamy
16. Incomplete institution
17. Replacement level fertility
18. “Second demographic transition”
19. Sibling data, twin data
V. Readings
Of course, you are responsible for all of the readings. For those readings that summarize
literature related to a particular aspect of family behavior (e.g., the Smock paper on
cohabitation), you should have a good idea of:
1. What the general trends are
2. What the central questions of sociological interest are
3. Why these questions are of central interest
4. The central theoretical frameworks relevant to this aspect of family behavior
5. Some of the ways that sociologists commonly address their questions of interest
6. Central findings from this research
7. Implications of findings
For those readings that present analyses (i.e., Wilkie et. al., Schoen et al., Groat et al.),
you should pay particular attention to the following points:
1. What question(s) do the authors address?
2. Why are these questions important (i.e., who cares)?
3. What theoretical frameworks do the authors draw upon?
4. What are the characteristics of the data used?
5. What do they find?
6. What are the implications of their findings?
7. What are the limitations of their research?