Class notes for FMLY 1000 University of Manitoba. The notes are complete and include everything included in FMLY course. The textbook used is Canadian Families Today New Perspective.
Module 1 – Conceptualizing Families, Past and Present
Chapter 1. Introduction to Diversity in Canada’s Families (p.3-22)
“the family” – politically and ideologically charged concept that involves complexities in interpretation
and legitimacy as defined by our laws and policies and our changing social norms and values
Household – a group of people who occupy the same dwelling or housing unit
Transgender – individuals who have a gender identity, or gender expression, that differs from their
assigned sex
Quantitative study/research - a set of statistical analysis intended to discover patterns and trends in
data, and casual relationships between variables
Canadian Census – evolved to capture more of the diversity that makes up everyday life
Canadian demographic trends
- In 2016, there were 9,519,945 families in Canada, up from 9,389,700 only 5 years before
- Since the 2006 Census, the number of common-law couples has risen, as has the number of
lone-parent families and individuals living alone
- The growth in the number of individuals living alone—28.2% of households in Canada was
especially striking
- In 2016, there were 72,880 same-sex couples in Canada, representing 0.9% of all couples. 1/3,
or 33.4% of these same-sex couples, were married, with the rest living common-law. About 12%
of all same-sex couples that were counted had children living with them at the time of the 2016
Census
- Quantitative study of racialized trans and non-binary people in Canada, by Chih et al. (2020)
o found that like non-racialized respondents, racialized respondents were highly educated
but underemployed
o Racialized respondents reported high levels of discrimination, violence, and assault, as
well as negative experiences with police and the legal system
- Since the 2011 Census, the blended families (stepfamilies) are officially counted
- The 2016 Census found that among the 5.8 million children under the age of 14, 69.7% were
living with both of their biological or adoptive parents, and no stepsiblings or half-siblings; while
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, 30% were living in a lone-parent family, in a stepfamily; or in a family without their parents but
with grandparents, with other relatives or as foster children
- In 2016, 62.8% of children in stepfamilies were living with one of their biological or adoptive
parents and a stepparent
Blended families – also called stepfamilies; consists of parents and their children from their current
and any previous relationships (increasingly common)
Simple stepfamily – half-siblings or stepsiblings
Transnational, multi-local satellite families – a family that finds itself (temporarily) separated and
living across borders, in multiple locations
Astronaut families, with satellite children – term used in the 1980s to describe the Chinese Children
whose parents immigrated to North America, usually from Hong Kong or Taiwan, but returned to their
country of origin, leaving children, and sometimes spouses
Extended family – takes in both the household and the wider family circle, including kin such as
cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. A combination of these family members may share a
household, but the extended family does not necessarily reside together
Researchers studying transnational families --> documented changes and challenges that arise from
parent-child separations, long-distance relationships, extended family networks providing childcare,
and the often emotionally charged reunifications that follow from multi-local family arrangements
Most newcomers lived in nuclear families, however, family sizes tended to be larger for immigrant
families
Newcomers todays are more likely to live in families with incomes below the median family income in
Canada
See Table 1.2 Counting Census Families (p. 10-11)
Theoretical and Methodological Approaches
- Theories provide us with a lens through which we look at the social world, however, with a shift in
theory we take on different lens with which we try to understand the social world in general and
families in particular
- Theories suggest what we look at and how because each theory contains underlying assumptions
about how the social world works – which in turn guide our research questions and methods
- Sociologists and other family researchers within each theoretical tradition can and do use multiple
types of methods (both qualitative and quantitative)
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,- Anthropologists have been studying families in cross-cultural contexts, and comparative case studies,
for a relatively long time
- Goerge Murdock (1949)
o Surveyed 250 human societies
o Conclusions that he came up with
o Nuclear family was universal and served four basic social functions (1) sexual (2)
economic (3) reproductive (4) educational
o A man and woman constitute an efficient co-operating unit
▪ Man --> superior physical strength and ability to range further afield
▪ Woman --> lighter tasks performed in or near home
o All known societies work in a co-operating war (including man and woman) because of
innate and inevitable biological facts and differences
- Margaret Mead
o Did comparative ethnographic research in South Pacific --> qualitative and descriptive in nature
o Identified considerable variation across cultures and stressed that the division of labour in
every known society rests firmly on learned behaviour and not simply on biological experiences
o Did not dismiss or minimize biology, but instead argued that humans have learned, laboriously,
to be human
The two similar cross-cultural studies of societies from around the world came to different conclusions
about family life because of differing theoretical orientations
Theoretical Approaches
(1) functionalism
o Popular in North America throughout the 1940s and 1950s
o Structural functionalist theories are based on the idea of organic ontology
o Organic ontology --> assumes that society is like a living organism, made up of a series of
interrelated parts working together for the good of the whole
o Each social institution or subsystem serves specific functions, keeping society in a state of
equilibrium
o Individuals within institutions fill specific and prescribed roles for the proper functioning of the
institution and society
o From functionalists’ view, families are institutions that serve specific functions in society, and
family members are expected to fill prescribed roles within the institution for the good of
society as a whole
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, o Murdock --> believed that we can best understand the family by examining what it does and
how it functions for, and within, society
o Talcott Parsons (1955) --> studies functions of family by looking at the roles of men and women
fill withing them. He believed that men are biologically better suited to fulfill instrumental
functions and women are better suited to performing expressive functions (in other words,
nurturing roles)
Instrumental functions – tasks that need to be performed to ensure a family’s physical survival,
including providing for material needs by earning an income
Expressive functions – tasks involved in building emotionally supportive relationships among family
members that are needed to foster physical well-being
(2) Marxism
o Looks outside of families to economic forms and relationships
o Opposite of functionalist theory
o Friedrich Engels
o provided a very different explanation and approach to the study of families in Origins of
the Family, Private Property and the State (1972 [1884]).
o argued that the number of distinct phases in human history shape, alter, and constrain
human relations.
o explained that mode of production (including foraging in primitive communism, land-
based feudalism, or modern industry and profit-driven capitalism) affects the way we
organize social life and experience family relations
o For Marxists
o The social goal is to abolish private property, re-establish communism, and return to
more equitable relations between the sexes
o Gender differences in power and status and the domination of men and women, within
and outside families, are neither natural nor inevitable but rather are a product of the
(re)organization of economic life
o Implies that social change is a normal, and at times desirable, part of social life
o Main goal for family researchers is to identify power relations within the home and
connect them to inequities in economic relations outside it
(3) Symbolic Interactionism
o Looks within families at social relations
o George Herbert Mead
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