Family_Research

To what extent has theory and research on families been successful in transcending the individual–society dualism' Panta rhei (Heraclit) This essay presents and evaluates research on family topics in the context of individual-society dualism and related interrogative themes. Research in the past three decades has set out to investigate how individuals and their society are related and is such trying to overcome the formerly drawn boundaries between the individual as an autonomic actor equipped with a set of cognitive skills and the social context often conceptualised in rough categories like “economic background”. A primary area of relationship, which everybody across cultures experiences very early in their lives is some network of close kinship, the family. This essay draws on research on family, in particular on research in the framework of critical social psychology. It aims to explain the characteristics of discursive psychology and its main research focus as an example how recent research goes about investigating social matters to come to the conclusion that where quantitative research can establish general laws and underlying principles qualitative research can reveal how knowledge is constructed and located in a historical and social context. Individuals and their surrounding, society, are the object of research in social psychology Individual and society are the two entities that can’t be thought of, one without the other. Human evolution driven forward by individuals is not thinkable without society . According to this view there has been a shift from researching either the individual or the surrounding society to looking into how the two of them are interwoven. Sociological social psychology has set out to map this situation in its research: “SSP concentrates on the reciprocity of society and the individual, sees its fundamental task as the explanation of social interaction, and relies methodologically on naturalistic observation and surveys”. The pretension of SSP is to transcend that dualism going even beyond the notion of a mere “interaction between biological and social factors”. In this context transcend can be seen as breaking up the notion of the individual being the agent disposing of a free will to act in a society constituting “the sum total of the actions of many disparate individuals choosing for themselves” and such having no causal power of its own on the one hand as opposite to a society determining the actions of its individuals on the other hand. The importance of these concepts can’t be valued high enough if we bear in mind that they have been reflected in different ideological beliefs separating a good part of the world for several decades into an Eastern and a Western bloc, into communist and capitalist systems. The former one building on the shaping capacities of society, the latter ones believing in the individual as the creator of its own fate. This example shows appropriately that the individual-society dualism comes along with its little brother agency- structure dualism: are we shaper or are we being shaped' In relation to families 2 levels of individual-society dualism can be determined if we assume that families are a social sub-group within society: The first level comprising the individual versus family and the second level encompassing the individual versus the social world outside their family. An example illustrating this multilevel understanding is how the very form of families changed in the last decades. In the after war society of the 20th century it was clear that the core of a family consisted of a married couple with children and some close kin like grand parents and siblings of the married couple loosely related. Nonconformity with this strong societal norm led to negative consequences for the individual trying to create and live their own, meaning a different, understanding of family or refusing at all the concept of family valid at the time. This is especially true if the individual was a woman. These negative consequences appeared on the one hand at the level of the family itself in that the individual had to bear hostility from the family itself and risked to loose support by the family. On the other hand society punished the individual deviating from the norm by not accepting the individual life-style e.g. by blocking professional careers or treating not married couples in a different way than married. Recent research could show that changes at both levels have occurred. The very notion of family became broader by including distant kin as well as friends and patchwork kin. As a consequence Virginia Morrow could show that in the understanding of 8 to 14 year-olds the importance of marital status or biological relatedness recede in favour of the quality and the engagement of the family members. A mile stone in the constant transformation of the understanding of what is a family is the acceptance of same-sex couples supported by legal acts like the Civil Partnership Act, 2005 in the UK, according rights to these couples that are similar to those of heterosexual married couples. This development not only broadens the variety of choices an individual can make with regard to their life style, it also creates a higher acceptance of this variety at the level of the family as well as at the level of the society. However there is debate about whether these changes represent a positive development or whether it destroys desirable family bonds. We can’t talk about this kind of changes without taking into account power relations and the anxiety change produces in those who feel their identity threatened by those changes. The main concern of discursive psychology is the construction and reconstruction of identity and individual reality through discourse. Those identities and realities are situated, this means they are different in different places and they undergo change over time in the sense that for example assuming a particular social role like being a wife 50 years ago meant something entirely different than today. It also meant and means something different e.g. in traditional Asian societies than in modern western societies. Within these societies there are huge differences depending on educational level, social status and degree of wealth. The main merit of discourse analysis within critical psychology is that it points at these many aspects that are linked and interwoven, that it makes them visible through the different sources of discourse and that it allows for change of both society and the individual by critically describing, analysing and interpreting its effects. A closer look at some research examples reveals how critical social psychology shows the interconnectedness of individual and society and how power relations become visible. Although living alone became an increasingly represented pattern of life-style in the past decades the notion of singleness is still commonly established as opposed to the one of family (Lucey, 2007). Research carried out by Reynolds and Wetherell (2003) focuses on how single women are at the same time the product and the producers of discourses by using different available interpretative repertoires to construct their social identity. These repertoires represent ideological dilemmas as they are contradictory like for example ‘self-actualisation and achievement’ versus ‘personal deficit’ (Reynolds and Wetherell 2003). This makes it difficult to talk freely about desires for company without being labelled as “lacking” or “dysfunctional”. Reynolds and Wetherell argue for the status of singleness as socially constructed and ideologically embedded used to define frameworks for social life. However interesting and necessary these findings are the argument does not include the possibility that the notion of singleness as being an ‘un-normal’ way of life is not ideologically defined but a remainder from the evolutionary process, which led to the survival of humans. It is assumed that group behaviour skills like communication, cooperation and shared intentionality made homo sapiens the fittest to survive. (Tomasello, 1999). So the rather negative feelings about singleness, which not only concern women might as well be implanted in our genetic systems to a certain degree. Gender related problems can be identified in many areas of social life. One of these areas is domestic work. The unequal, gender biased division of domestic work is still persistent (Hallway, 2007). Even if both partners are in paid employment women provide the main part of housework and child care (Baxter, 2000 and Dempsey). Interestingly there is an inconsistence between peoples’ supporting the idea of fair division of house work, i.e. their attitude on the one hand, and their readiness to assess the own unequal distribution of domestic labour as fair on the other hand. (Coltrane). They do not translate inequality into a lack of fairness. Researchers set out to investigate this discrepancy. Dixon and Wetherell (2004) raise the issue of household being an unusual context in which the notion of fairness arises and point to the moral quality of fairness that is reconstructed in “day-to-day discourse” (Dixon and Wetherell, 2004). Leigh Thompson used the Distribution Justice Framework (DJF) based on questionnaire methodology to tackle down possible components that influence peoples perception related to inequalities in domestic labour. She uses comparison referents that to assess people attitudes. Comparison referents are the standards that people apply to judge their current situation in terms of outcomes (Gager, 1998). These comparison referents may be taken from different areas such as comparisons to others, prior experience, or expectations. Comparison can be made on two levels: within-gender, when women compare themselves and their situation to other women and between-gender, when they compare themselves to the opposite sex. Thompson argues that women are more inclined to within-gender comparison by comparing their partners to the one of other women Thompson, 1991). Seeing that their neighbour’s husband behaves even worse than her own, they might feel privileged, a feeling prevailing the one of general fairness. In addition it is probably important for the construction of social identity and self esteem, and might therefore have an impact on the attitude taken up by women making within-gender comparisons, that she is not the looser who got he lazy unfair husband. However, these findings do not account for the many details the construction of identities and the existing power relations within family routines and relationships contain. An extract from a qualitative study carried out by Caline Drydens (Dryden, 1999) sheds light on how the participant Rachael tries to analyse and make sense of her current condition namely that domestic work is quite unequally distributed in her household and how the uses available interpretive repertoires and subject positions to do so. However short the excerpt may be, it is rich in terms of what discourse can reveal e.g. with regard to power relations, the individual-society relation, fairness, gender issues, … Rachael seems to accept the distribution of roles in her couple and the type of task which is related to this: the female stays at home and does the house work while the male goes out. This not only dispenses him from labour in the household but he’s at ‘work’. Rachael not only doesn’t question the common sense assumption that it’s fair to do chore work if she stays at home but her wording also reveals that household work is no real work (“… I’m at home and he’s at work …, (Dryden, 1999). This may cause a shift in the power relations of the couple towards the male partner as the high value of ‘work’ is a dominant cultural idea. This example shows how the available interpretive repertoires are taken up in discourse, which power relations are prevailing and how this leads to a reproduction of inequalities in the marital relationship. There are man roads leading to knowledge about the individual and society. Tearing down the wall separating the two areas as shown above is a most promising one, especially if perspectives and methods are combined. Linking quantitative methods (e.g. questionnaires) that can tackle down underlying principles and qualitative methods (e.g. discourse analysis) investigating how individuals make sense of themselves and their surroundings by using repertoires available in society can rule out weaknesses of both methods and amount to broader knowledge. To sum it up: Yes, we are shapers and we are being shaped and it’s all an ongoing process. 2000 words