A complete summary of all the mandatory literature in the course Families in Context, given at Tilburg University in 2024 by prof. Ivanova. A list of all the summarized titles is on the first and second page of the preview. The summary is fully in English. I also have a summary of all the lectures ...
Before lecture 1............................................................................................................................2
Bernardes (1997) | Family lives............................................................................................... 3
Nauck (2021) | Cross cultural perspectives in family research................................................ 6
Cowan (2015) | When is a relationship between facts a causal one?..................................... 8
Coontz (2013) | When numbers mislead................................................................................. 9
Before lecture 2..........................................................................................................................10
Konietzka & Kreyenfeld (2021) | Life course sociology: key concepts and applications in
family sociology......................................................................................................................11
Liefbroer & Billari (2010) | Bringing norms back in: a theoretical and empirical discussion of
their importance for understanding demographic behaviour................................................. 14
Mayer (2004) | Whose lives? How history, societies and institutions define and shape life
courses.................................................................................................................................. 16
Before lecture 3..........................................................................................................................19
Bellani, Esping-Andersen & Nedoluzhko (2017) | Never partnered: a multilevel analysis of
lifelong singlehood................................................................................................................. 20
Schwartz (2013) | Trends and variation in assortative mating............................................... 22
Before lecture 4..........................................................................................................................24
Mills, Rindfuss, McDonald & Te Velde (2011) | Why do people postpone parenthood?
Reasons and social policy incentives.................................................................................... 25
Dykstra & Hagestad (2007) | Roads less taken - Developing a nuanced view of older adults
without children......................................................................................................................26
Preisner, Neuberger, Bertogg & Schaub (2020) | Closing the happiness gap: The decline of
gendered parenthood norms and the increase in parental life satisfaction........................... 28
Before lecture 5..........................................................................................................................29
Altintas (2016) | The widening educational gap in developmental child care activities in the
US..........................................................................................................................................30
Calarco McCrory (2011) | Social class and children's help-seeking in elementary school.... 31
Milkie & Warner (2014) | Status safeguarding: mothering works as safety net..................... 32
Before lecture 6..........................................................................................................................33
Sullivan (2021) | The gender division of housework and child care.......................................34
Thebaud (2010) | Masculinity, bargaining and breadwinning. Understanding men’s
housework in the cultural context of paid work...................................................................... 35
,Before lecture 7..........................................................................................................................37
Mortelmans (2021) | Causes and consequences of family dissolution in Europe and
post-divorce families.............................................................................................................. 38
Kreidl, Stipkova & Hubatkova (2017) | Parental separation and children’s education in a
comparative perspective: does the burden disappear when separation is more common?.. 40
Before lecture 8..........................................................................................................................41
McLanahan (2004) | Diverging destinies: how children are faring under the second
demographic transition.......................................................................................................... 42
Cowan & Cowan (2015) | Beyond family structure: family process studies help to reframe
debates about what’s good for children................................................................................. 46
Before lecture 9..........................................................................................................................47
Kalmijn (2014) | Adult intergenerational relationships........................................................... 48
Brandt (2013) | Intergenerational help and public assistance in Europe: a case of
specialization......................................................................................................................... 50
Before lecture 1
,Bernardes (1997) | Family lives
In the first report of the Research Centre on Micro-Social Change, they said:
Family events were by far regarded as the most important aspect of people’s lives.
96% of all humans valued family the most in their lives.
The danger in studying family is your own closeness to the topic. This is not a bias but affects
the strength of beliefs about family lives.
Within a family, we first experience differences, divisions and hierarchies, which in the family
are structured around gender and age.
The nuclear family:
A young, similarly aged white married heterosexual couple with a small number of
healthy children living in an adequate home. There is a clear division of responsibilities
in which the male is the primary breadwinner and the female is the caregiver and
perhaps part-time income earner.
The model is too unrealistic. There can be no divorce, diversity, poverty, homelessness etc.
The nuclear family retains a potency such that all other forms tend to be defined with reference
to it. This is attractive to opinion leaders because it asserts the correctness of clear gender
divisions, parental responsibility for children and privacy of the family.
People get the opinion on families by religion and associated morality. Religious beliefs
remain as foundations of widely accepted social beliefs. Social science is mostly remarkably
conservative in relation to family life.
Traditional sociology sees the family as the key institution responsible for rearing children to
become mature adults able to undertake paid work in the formal economy.
By the failure to question the idea of the family, mistaken ideas persist:
- Naturalness of monogamy
- Inevitability of female inferiority
- The right of many men to control and abuse women.
- The right of parents to control and punish children.
The nuclear family is the ideal type, but there is never a match with ideal types in real life.
, The problem for sociologists is 2 folded:
1. Ideal is often taken into mean with normal. Which people should aspire to achieve. That
makes the ideal type the best version people should live by.
2. Sociologists have rarely enquired whether this ideal type reflects everyday family living
because it has been so obvious.
The power and obviousness of the family is rooted in biology. The sexes are different in
biological reproduction. Animals hold different roles in reproduction and parenting too. That is
the biological family: lifelong monogamy between male and female, where the female is
responsible for the rearing of the children.
This is reinforced by the morality: if it comes from nature, scientists believe it is universal. If it is
universal, people assume it is natural and all other sorts are unnatural.
Murdocks thesis on the description of the nuclear family:
The nuclear family is a universal social grouping. Either as the sole prevailing form of the
family or as the basic unit from which more complex familial forms are compounded, it
exists as a distinct and strongly functional group in every known society.
+ Reiss adds: Murdock actually observed the universality of sexual reproduction.
The family and marriage in Britain is a book from Fletcher that states:
The family is, and has always been, the most intimate and one of the most important of
human groups. With qualifications of negligible importance, it can be said to be
universal. The human family is centered around biological propensities and needs:
mating, the begetting of children and the rearing of children.
- This shows the error of linking biological reproduction with the social form of family.
Sociology, biology, history and universality contribute to the power of the family.
Industrialization involves a shift from rural extended families to isolated urban nuclear
families.
This analysis has 2 problems:
● It is deeply ethnocentric, ignoring other cultures and minority cultures withing European
societies.
● We must ask whether the pictures of the past we have may reflect the hopes and wishes
of the literature classes rather than the realities of families.
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