Family

Research and Science Today

Journal of Family Therapy, 2009

In this paper, which is based on a larger research study, I address the research question: How is 'the family' constructed and talked about in intercultural and intracultural systemic clinical sessions? I use the qualitative research method of discourse analysis to analyse transcripts from eleven intercultural and intracultural video-taped family therapy sessions. The participants in the research study were South Asian and White British clinicians and families. Through discourse analysis, I identified the 'Outsider-Insider discourse of family life' to describe the different ways in which families define the boundaries around 'the family'. The findings suggest that although 'the family' was constructed differently by South Asian and White British families, cliniciansregardless of whether they were working interculturally or intraculturally-privileged a discourse of 'the family' as a two-generation, two-parent unit. The theoretical, clinical and training implication of this finding will be discussed. 'What should I draw next, Mum?' asked my son Miheer, then aged 8. 'Why don't you draw your family?' I suggested somewhat absently. Twenty minutes later: 'I've run out of paper, Mum.' Looking down, I saw a vast array of uncles, aunts and cousins drawn in bright colours. Each sheet of A3 paper had been used to depict a different country where a branch of Miheer's migrant extended family lived. In that moment I felt both perplexed and proud. I had imagined that Miheer's family map, like my own, would be compact and contained within a single sheet of paper. It would consist, centrally, of me, the single parent with whom he had always lived, and himself. I realized, humbly, that we had managed to create a context where Miheer could keep alive his relationships with his wider family and culture. It also dawned on me that Miheer and I, while living in the same 'family', had radically different ideas about what this meant.

2009

Public Affairs Quarterly , 2019

There are many different interpretations of what the family should be – its desired member composition, its primary purpose, and its cultural significance – and many different examples of what families actually look like across the globe. I examine the most paradigmatic conceptions of the family that are based upon the supposed primary purpose that the family serves for its members and for the state. I then suggest that we ought to reconceptualize how we understand and define the family in an effort to move away from these paradigmatic conceptions. This approach requires that we examine the way(s) in which the family has been defined descriptively – that is, how families have been defined historically – in an effort to determine what a normative theory of the family might look like. The goal of this inquiry is to define a family in terms of what it ought to be – a goal that moves our understanding of the family to a new conceptual landscape. I then present my own account of familial relations that aims to capture a normative understanding of the unique primary purpose that the family serves for its members.

Bristol University Press eBooks, 2023

Create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is 'nkali'. It's a noun that loosely translates to 'to be greater than another'. Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali. How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

Journal of Family Communication, 2009

This study replicates and extends research initiated by Trost (1990). In particular, 181 university students provided perceptual data on the family status of each of 23 structural constellations. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four experimental groups that manipulated two independent variables: the linguistic term used to assess family status ("a family" vs. "family") and the attributed quantity of communication among constellation members (low vs. high in frequency of interaction). Results indicated that the presence of children, intactness, co-residence of family members, marriage, heterosexuality (but only in the absence of children), and non-fictive union increased perceptions of family status. Across all structural features, the attributed presence of frequent communication increased the perception of family status. "Family" is a hotly contested term among family scholars in general, including family communication scholars. Cheal (1993) observed that changes in societal demographics pushed family science in the 1980s and 1990s toward greater attention to alternative family structures beyond what Stacey (1990) termed the "modern" family based on a two-parent nuclear model. However, consensus is far from evident in the scholarly community. Relatively neglected is the layperson view on what a "family" is. In family communication, a classic study of layperson conceptions of "family" is Trost's (1990) survey among a Swedish population, later replicated among university students in the United States by Ford (1994). The current study

Social Sciences, 2020

The family is increasingly a site of political intervention as a locus of pervasive social inequalities and a potential resource for resolving injustices. Contemporary political theory has engaged in extensive debate about what justice in the family requires, but rather less on how family is understood: ethicists have tended to use placeholder definitions which dismiss the need to engage with real-world practices. We show that this is problematic because it obscures morally important aspects of day to day family life and risks taking privileged positions as representative. The paper proposes that theorists could gain from adopting the sociological ‘family practice’ framework, which we argue can form the basis of a distinct and plausible ethical theory of family. This can provide a fruitful basis for further research and engagement in political debate because it better conceptualizes contemporary family life. The paper therefore also illustrates how research from empirical social sci...

Revista de Pesquisa: Cuidado é Fundamental Online, 2014

The growth of the technology in the world is the best achievement of the present-day civilization, but it is bringing us into one type of life and unifying our style of living, clothes, behavior and even language. Technology has replaced live communication and they are stirring the borderline between diverse cultures, and people become more and more technology dependent. Smaller nations in this globalized world are losing their cultures and languages, their unique inherited family values, which came to them through the huge number of centuries and experience of hundreds of generations. Family which was once a source for each member becomes just as a tick in their documents and it does not play the same role as it was before. Nevertheless, there are a few groups of people, who try to keep their close family relationship and who try to keep their own family concept, keep it for the next generation. Living in the large extended families they show that the family really is a small community, but from the family starts the society and the state. In this article I will refer to some family values of Native American tribes and Nomadic Kyrgyz tribes from Central Asia. These two different groups of people have much more common between each other and there are a lot to share with.

Like in other cultures, the Hindu family also represents a social institution that developed in passage of time and has always been practiced as a core element in the development and maintenance of the value and ethics systems and lifeways for an individual as well as for the close clan and castes and altogether in making the societal world that further influence the state and nation. That is how the changes in family structure and its values are given much attention for understanding social scenario and state of development. In fact, the development of an individual, society, and state very much depends on the family and related lifeways and inherent life philosophy. The structure and function of the family is not any more traditional product of cultural history but it also indicates changing and shifting relation to wider niches of social and economic developments. Of course, the family is the foundational institution in societies ― an institution which is a frame or gaze of identity, emotion, cultural expression, care, despair, reproductive labour, systemic and systematic violence, repression, and domination in ways that other institutions are not. Moreover, it is foundational where constantly run contestations over life and culture. In India the position of family, especially of Hindus, has been central and critical. The family performs important task which contribute to society’s basic needs and helps to perpetuate social order. Family is also described as “a group of persons directly linked by kin connections, the adult members of assume responsibility for caring for children”.