SOC100H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter SP: CH 11, RS: CH 37, 40, 46: Conflict Theories, Intimate Partner Violence, South Asia
SP Chapter 11: Families and Age Groups
●Types of families
○Family: any social unit, or set of social relations, that does what families are popularly
imagined to do
○Nuclear family: traditional idea of a family; a group living in the same dwelling that
consists of a father and a mother, and their child or children
■Consists of no more than three relationships: a relationship between spouses, a
relationship between parents and children, and a relationship between siblings, if
two or more children are involved
○Extended family: consists of multiple generations of relatives living together, or several
adult siblings, their spouses, and their children, all sharing a dwelling and resources
■May contain certain relations between grandparents and grandchildren, blood
relatives and in-laws, aunts and nephews, and cousins, etc
○Census family: according to statistics Canada, a household that includes two spouses
--opposite-or same-sex, married or cohabiting (if they have lived together for longer than
one year) --with or without never-married children, or a single parent with one or more
never-married children
■However, many units that meet these kinds of structural definitions don’t actually
behave like “ideal” families, and many units that behave like ideal families do not
meet the structural or formal definition
●Focus on family processes instead of family forms
○Features shared by families
■Dependency: family relations tend to include long-term commitments, both to
each other and ot the family as a social unit. In reality, many families lack these
attachments and commitments, and interdependency is limited
■Intimacy: family members ideally have a deep understanding of, and familiarity
with, one another. They are also expected to develop feelings of affection and
trust
■Sexuality: adult partners in families ideally have, or are expected to have, a long-
term, exclusive sexual relationship, while children are expected to not have
sexual relationships with one another or with their parents
■Protection. Idealized families guard their members against all kinds of internal
and external dangers. For example, parents are supposed to keep their children
safe from household dangers, and away from drugs, alcohol, and predators
●Ways of looking at families and age groups
○Functionalism
■View the family as a microcosm of society, with individual family members
coming together to form a unified and productive whole and, in that way, making
a major contribution to the survival of society (Lehmann)
■Talcott Parsons and Robert Bales: the family’s gendered division of labor is the
key to success
■See families as small social systems, with systemic properties and resources
●Family’s are important for producing and socializing the next generation
■Families that are most adaptable and cohesive share similar traits
●Have the most open patterns of interpersonal communication: they make
a practice of sharing and discussing their concerns
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●When they disagree, they have structured, adaptive ways of making
decisions
●Have democratic or semi-democratic processes for setting group goals
●Bound together by a family culture that includes shared values, beliefs,
and even rituals
■Interested in how a society revitalizes itself with new members in order to neet
unfamiliar challenges with new skills and ideas
■Disengagement theory (Elaine Cumming and William Henry): holds that as
people age and their abilities decline, they withdraw to the edges of society to
begin to prepare for their eventual death while making way in the workforce and
other spheres of influence for a younger, modern generation
●Aging is not only a natural process of physical decline nut also a natural
process of exclusion and self-exclusion from social life, and in this way,
society remains efficient and functions well
●Stress that such change is both natural and crucial to society's
effectiveness, by allowing new ideas to replace old ones and opening up
the workforce to the next generation
○Conflict theory
■Does not assume that families operate as systems, maximizing the good of their
members and contributing to the survival of society
■Takes a historical approach and focuses on political and economic changes that
have affected family life, especially changes that cause shifts in power
relationships within families
■Views industrialization as one of the most important of these changes, since it
saw the family change from a self-sustaining unit of production to a unit of
consumption in a society marked by consumer capitalism
●The family became dependent on sources of income outside the
household to meet its survival needs
●In traditional families, working-class men had to sell their labor power to
the bourgeoisie in exchange for an income
●Women, for their part, came to have exclusive control over the home,
relegated to responsibility for the tasks of childbearing, food preparation,
and the providing emotional support
■The power imbalance in families has made patriarchy --control over the family by
a dominant male-- a central fact in the history of family life in most known
societies
■Proposes that age-based decision-making --for example, age-based mandatory
retirement--does not serve society as a whole, but is really a form of
discrimination exercised by middle-aged people to further their own interests
●A way of dislodging powerful, high-income people from their positions,
affording opportunities for upward mobility from below
■Views the ageism implicit in mandatory retirement as linked to the capitalist
commodification of labor power, and competition between workers
●Ageism: all types of prejudice or discrimination against members of
society based on an individual’s age, whether old or young
■The concept of old age arose with the introduction of paid retirement in Germany
in the 1880s; the invention of “retirement” led to the idea of old age
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■Consider forced retirement a form of age-based discrimination
■Ageism often benefits the middle-aged, who make up the largest population.
Both the very young and old lack the organization and power that would better
allow them to influence public policy
○Symbolic interactionism
■Used to study how members of a family interact with one another and resolve
conflicts within the boundaries of their roles in the family
●Particularly the creation and revision of family “myths” that help families
remember and celebrate who they are, though they also lock families into
repeated (sometimes dysfunctional) patterns of behavior
■Social constructionists focus on the way family ideologies are developed and
used in the political realm
●“Family values” ideology promoted most fervently by right-wing religious
leaders and conservative politicians in the US. By appealing to people’s
natural concerns about the wellbeing of their families, these moral
entrepreneurs channel popular anxieties into hostility against such
groups as single mothers
○Produce support for political initiatives that reduce social welfare
spending and coerce the behavior of other minorities --for
example, urban blacks in the US or Aboriginal people in Canada,
who are accused of failing to lead morally decent family lives or
instill “family values” in their children
■Focus on how socially constructed definitions of age and aging affect a person’s
experience of growing old
●Stresses that society labels and defines age, making people’s
experience of aging largely a state of mind
■Activity theory (Havighurst and Algrecht): argue against functionalist
disengagement theory, and proposes that people actually take on new roles, and
even new identities, as they age, even after they have left the workforce
●Preserves a sense of continuity, helps people preserve a positive self-
concept, and contributes to greater life satisfaction
●People who keep up a high activity level age more successfully
■Examined how society in general and the media in particular portray elderly
people
●Women tend to disappear from the media as they age, and while
younger women may be paired with older men, it is rare for a younger
man to be romantically involved with a significantly older woman
○Symbolic interactionists are interested in the processes that
produce and disseminate such ideas, and their effects on
ordinary people as they age
○Feminism
■Focus on the link between the modern nuclear family, the economy, and
women’s subordination
■Social reproduction: all of the social, economic, ideological, and political
processes that preserve the social structure and its component relationships over
time
■Family promotes social reproduction in a capitalist society
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SOC100H1 Full Course Notes
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Document Summary
Family: any social unit, or set of social relations, that does what families are popularly imagined to do. Nuclear family: traditional idea of a family; a group living in the same dwelling that consists of a father and a mother, and their child or children. Consists of no more than three relationships: a relationship between spouses, a relationship between parents and children, and a relationship between siblings, if two or more children are involved. Extended family: consists of multiple generations of relatives living together, or several adult siblings, their spouses, and their children, all sharing a dwelling and resources. May contain certain relations between grandparents and grandchildren, blood relatives and in-laws, aunts and nephews, and cousins, etc. Census family: according to statistics canada, a household that includes two spouses. -opposite-or same-sex, married or cohabiting (if they have lived together for longer than one year) --with or without never-married children, or a single parent with one or more never-married children.
