Committee on Family Research

Bárbara Barbosa Neves is our May guest blogger. Bárbara is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Technical University of Lisbon in Portugal (ISCSP-UTL). She is also a research fellow at the Centre for Public Administration & Policies. You can find her here. Thanks for your multidisciplinary contribution, Bárbara. Please do not forget to leave your comments and feedback below.

My research has been focused on the social impact of technology, mainly of the Internet. And although I have been immersed in the field of sociology of technology, family studies have always had a significant influence on my work.

The “family factor” on my work is twofold: First, Information & Communication Technologies (ICT), such as mobile phones, computers, and the Internet, shape family life. Second, “family” seems to be a determinant factor for ICT adoption and perception, at least for the elderly population.

The societal effects of ICT usage, especially at the family and community level, have been a major concern for social scientist and society alike. Fears of social isolation and alienation have been constantly associated with new technology. In the words of Steven Pinker:

“New forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber. So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans. But such panics often fail basic reality checks.”

Despite a prominent dystopian view of the Internet – clearly visible in the public discourse, from popular culture to political narratives – research has been supporting a positive relationship between ICT and family life. ICT are not dividing and isolating family members; on the contrary, the evidence shows that ICT are facilitating social interaction among its members. Besides providing connection among family members, ICT are used to articulate different schedules and to coordinate family life. For instance, a Pew report on North-American families concludes that mobile phones allow family members to stay more regularly in touch; and that the Internet is used by many members of married-with-children households to view online material together.

Moreover, as I could conclude in my doctoral research, Internet usage is a strong predictor of social capital and of bonding. Bonding is a dimension of social capital related to the resources that are potentially available and can be mobilized from our strong ties, which are composed of close family members and close friends. The probability of having a high level of bonding increases with Internet usage.

In a study of usage and perception of ICT by a representative sample of 500 Portuguese elderly, a colleague and I found that one of the main reasons to have a mobile phone was a family request. In addition, in the qualitative phase of our study, we could grasp that there was a clear emotional family connection with mobile phones. One of our interviewees, Ana, said that she always carries her mobile phone around for two reasons: first, it allows her to permanently be in contact with her family; second, it has pictures of her and her grandchildren, which makes her feel closer to her family. As I noted elsewhere, the mobile phone represents a kind of a “family memory box”.

Similarly, the respondent’s grandchildren visibly influenced their usage and perception of computers and the Internet. The grandchildren encouraged grandparents to adopt new technologies, which accentuates the importance of inter-generational relationships. The positive perceptions of these ICT were also fueled by the grandchildren’s account: they would tell their grandparents about the usefulness and convenience of ICT.

Even more interesting was that besides Internet users and non-users we found another type of users: the “faux users”. A faux user is a person that considers himself or herself a non-user but intermittently uses a technology with assistance of others. For instance, Ana has a daughter and a baby grandchild living in France. Ana sees pictures of them on a family member’s computer and communicates with her daughter through Skype, a peer-to-peer video conferencing program. Ana’s family members setup the computer and the Internet for her. She depends on her family members to facilitate this social experience. So, once again, the family is an important factor for the access and use of ICT.

Of course this intersection of family and ICT or of family and new technology is extremely complex and multifaceted. Rejecting any kind of technological determinism, what do you think ICT can tell us about contemporary family life? How does technology shape families and how families, in turn, shape technology?

We are very pleased to have Professor Susan McDaniel as our March guest blogger. Susan is Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Global Population & Life Course, Prentice Research Chair, Professor of Sociology, and the Director of the Prentice Institute in Global Population & Economy, at the University of Lethbridge in Canada. You can find her here. Please do not forget to leave your comments and feedback below. So, without further ado, here is Susan’s interesting contribution:

My research tends to be both longitudinal, i.e. life course focussed, and comparative. In this blog posting, I draw on both from my ongoing longitudinal, comparative research on family changes and challenges in various parts of the world.

The quotes are from real people interviewed about their challenges in today’s economically precarious environment.

“I feel like I am stretched and stretched, being pulled in a million directions…” notes a respondent in the U.S. who is facing challenges in a multi-generational family, each member of which is facing various economic difficulties, and the respondent is called upon to help them out.

“Unless I win the lottery, I can’t retire. My mortgage is for 40 years”, Midlife respondent in my Canada/US study, looking toward the older years in the Great Recession.

These two quotes are exemplary of many family members who feel pressed and stretched in 2012, particularly as they live in multi-generational families, whether or not they share the same household.

We talk a lot in family sociology and in public discourse about family choices increasing. I wonder… Do we say, shall I be a lone parent living on low income, an older divorced woman/man, in a lesbian/gay couple, wed or not, a widow/widower or a child of divorced parents? I tend to think not. Do we long for a multi-generation family that is both pressed and stretched in a world-wide recession where much of what we worked for and dreamt about may be threatened? I tend to think not.

Yet, we all carry with us family baggage, images and dreams of what families should be, and what our children should achieve that we did not or could not. We try to make good decisions but those decisions turn inside out as jobs decrease, debt increases (both personal and state), and mobility options reduce. Instead of dreams of a better future for our children, they live as adults increasingly with midlife and older parents, as ‘cellar-dwellers’ or ‘boomerangs’ whose parents’ lifestyles they emulate by being supported by the parents. Canadian economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, notes wryly that ideals about anything, maybe particularly about families and what they should be, change very, very slowly, if at all. “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. “ We try to act as if our families are not pressed and stretched but managing. We cover over, cover up and huddle together to ‘make do.’

Long lenses can help in understanding families in 2012 that are increasingly pressed and stretched. Long lenses are of three types, the first being a life course lens. My comparative longitudinal research has several important findings when we look at families in generations with a life course lens. With linked lives in families, people carry generations and generational expectations with them to their interactions over time. As families are pressed and stretched, conflicts are likely to escalate, particularly when younger generations face economic challenges their elders never dreamt of. What affects us going into family transitions, which are built into family life, are events years earlier and events now. The intersection of biography and history matters ever more in families that are pressed and stretched. Lastly, we find that income inequalities in societies at crucial life stages and at family transition points matter significantly to opportunities, successes, and life trajectories overall.

The second way that long lenses matter is seeing families assembled or reassembled into generations, with long lenses built in. We see how long lenses help us to understand families and change over time in another of my current projects, looking at diverse families living on low income who are deeply stressed and pressed. We find that they make family for themselves. They rely on grandparents to help in all kinds of ways, even if those ‘grandparents’ are not blood relations at all. These families reach out across time to connect with other generations.

The third long lens approach comes from very new research on child development. From the Developing Child Project, Harvard University, five significant findings are worth noting: 1) Getting things right the first time is easier and more effective than trying to fix them later; 2) Early childhood matters because experiences early in life can have a lasting impact on later learning, behavior, and health throughout life; 3) Highly specialized interventions are needed as early as possible for children experiencing toxic stress; 4) 4. Early life experiences actually get under the skin and into the body, with lifelong effects on adult physical and mental health; and 5) All of society benefits from investments in early childhood programs.

These findings have already had an effect on policies and approaches of the American Academy of Pediatrics who recommend the “leveraging of science to inform the development of innovative strategies to reduce the precipitants of toxic stress in young children and to mitigate their negative effects on the course of development and health across the life span” (Published online January 1, 2012 PEDIATRICS Vol. 129 No. 1 January 2012, pp. e224-e231, from the American Academy of Pediatrics).

Reconciling work and family life is a key challenge in contemporary societies. Many families face conflicts when attempting to meet the requirements of work and home. However, searching for a balance does not only concern individuals and families. It is also an issue for workplaces and social policies. Thus, approaching this topic from different levels of analysis (micro / meso / macro) is a particular focus adopted by this Summer School. At all levels, specific aspects are brought into discussion, such as family members’ perspectives, childcare, parental leave policies, time use, career patterns, life course, family forms, gender roles, and labour market flexibilisation.

The Marie Jahoda Summer School 2012 aims to advance research and to promote young scholars. It offers PhD students the opportunity to get novel input on topics related to work and family, to compile feedback and guidance for their own research, and to establish networks with other researchers in the field.

The Summer School will be hosted by the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, and is funded by the University of Vienna.

We start 2012 with a stimulating blog post by our president, Rudolf Richter. Besides being the president of this committee, Rudolf is a Professor of sociology at the University of Vienna, Austria. Don’t forget to comment and leave your feedback. Happy New Year!

Who belongs to the family? Who is invited to family gatherings like Christmas holidays, New Year celebrations, Chanukah, Thanksgiving, end of Ramadan? This year at our dinner table at home in Vienna we had four languages: German (Austrians speak German, yes – I am always asked on international conferences), English, French and Spanish. This is because of the partners of our daughters and nephews. Nearly at each yearly meeting we have someone at our place we do not know: the cousin of a partner from England, the mother-in-law of another one from Colombia and so on. What is considered to be a family is rather widespread and people belonging to it change from time to time.

Now, this above might not be an example of extensive variety. I have not talked of stepfamilies or patchwork families, and we have talked only of a very small region: middle Europe. Looking, let’s say, at Scandinavia we will find different compositions – probably neighbors and friends might also participate. Neither have we talked of the south of Europe where, what we traditionally call the extended family, prevails. And we have not talked about the families in the Arab world, in different states in Africa and the Asian family. (Does the latter exist? Can one even group together countries such as Thailand, India, China, Japan?)

During our last meeting in Kyoto a colleague introduced an international project and used family and kinship synonymously. On my question why not distinguish between the two concepts, he found no real answer except to say that the project members did not care about those differences – probably to difficult to deal with (I thought: what does that make for a science: using different terms – but it does not matter?).

In a PhD course taught last semester we read a paper about the meaning of theory by Gabriel Abend from Northwestern University. He discusses the use of seven different meanings of theory in sociology. The consequence: more or less senseless debates in reviews about an article having a theory or not when authors have different notions of theory – from hypotheses to ideology.

I have the same experience when attending international conferences and everyone is speaking of family pretending that we all attach the same meaning to the concept. Don’t we need a reflection on these different meanings? Do we use family as a primitive concept stemming from the background of Parsonian analyses during the fifties in the US and measure different forms from the standpoint of this definition? How do we deal with different concepts? Should we deal with them at all? Or lets stay there: using a vague concept and pretending we share the same meaning? Does it make sense though speaking of a global change of family with a local perspective?

Is this – at all – worthwhile considering? The French group around Bruno Latour promoted the so-called Actor-Network Theory. ANT has a flat view on society, looking what actors are doing and how they define their everyday living themselves. It would not matter who sociologists say belong to the family, it would just matter which items, communications, information and traditions – narratives! – constitute a family event –from Los Angeles to Shanghai. Should we promote an ethnographical turn in family sociology? Can it contribute to our knowledge? How?

The upcoming international seminar of the Committee on Family Research is organized by FaPOS (Family and Population Studies), and it will be held on the 12-14 September 2012 at K.U.Leuven, Belgium.

The theme of the seminar is:

New Family Forms following Family Dissolution: Consequences in/on Postmodern Society

This seminar focuses on the intertwined transitions in demographic regimes and family structures the past three decades. These transitions are both cause and consequence of the dramatic increase in family dissolution, and subsequently on new re-partnering patterns and processes. The aim of the CFR-seminar 2012 is to shed light on the specific dimensions of these changes and the mechanisms behind them. For possible themes, please check the call for abstracts here.

For more information on the programme check their website here. The website provides a full project description, as well as the application procedure and the online submission form.

The deadline for submitting your application is 10 February 2012. The selection of participants will be communicated by the beginning of April 2012.

If you have any question please contact cfrseminarleuven@soc.kuleuven.be

After the enormous success of our first guest blogger, we are back with a guest blogger for November. We skipped October because it was an extraordinarily busy month for all the CFR family, after our annual seminar in Japan. Emiko Ochiai, the chair of the CFR Kyoto Seminar Executive Committee, is our invited blogger. Emiko is Professor of Sociology at Kyoto University. In this blog post, she shares her impressions of the CFR seminar that she so efficiently organized in Japan. If you were at the Kyoto seminar, please leave us your comments and feedback.

A seminar for the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Family Research was held at Kyoto University from the 12th to the 14th of September 2011. This year it was hosted by the Japan Society of Family Sociology and the Kyoto University Global COE, with the theme of “Reconstruction of the Intimate and Public Spheres in a Global Perspective.” Over its three days we had eight presentation sessions, three poster sessions, two special sessions, and a special lecture by Emmanuel TODD of the INED. Including the poster sessions and special sessions, there were a total of 61 research presentations, with 186 participants from 19 different countries (8 in Asia, 8 in Europe, 2 in North America, and 1 other).

Dr. TODD’s special lecture (“Traditional Family Systems and Recent Demographic Differences in Eurasia: Is There Such a Thing as Modernity?”) was on his bold hypothesis on the historical development of the family that he developed in his new work: “L’origine des systèmes familiaux”. His idea that the nuclear family is the primitive one and the joint family is the newer was extremely stimulating. In the special sessions, we heard reports on the results of international comparative projects between families in Europe, from the KASS (Kinship and Social Security) Project, and in Asia, from the EASS (East Asian Social Survey 2006) and GCOE Family Survey Project. The presentation sessions covered a wide range of areas such as “Social Policy and Family,” “Gender and Work,” “Migration, Family and Community,” “Marriage Migration,” “Changing Families and Society,” “Intimacy in Varieties of Modernity,” “Parents and Children in Society,” and “Elders in Society.” Reflecting its large theme and the geographic location, the seminar served as a place of encounter for the researchers in various fields and from various regions of the world.

Professor Rudolf RICHTER (University of Vienna), President of the CFR, graciously gave us a lecture (“Family Sociology between Scientific and Social Impact”) at the Annual Meeting of the Japan Society of Family Sociology, which was held right before this seminar. I am happy that the seminar has deepened our ties with researchers around the world. If we can use this seminar to encourage even greater participation by family researchers from Japan and Asia in CFR and contribute to family studies on a global scale, then I believe that this seminar will have been a true success.

Today we start a new feature: the monthly guest blogger. Every month we’ll have an invited blogger to write about research or news in the field of sociology of family. The goal is to keep our website dynamic, and to promote more sharing and discussion among our community. For this first month, our invited blogger is Tessa LeRoux. Tessa LeRoux is a Professor of Sociology at Lasell College, working on gender and family studies, and director of the Donahue Institute for Values and Public Life. You can find her here. Thank you, Tessa, for this very interesting and thought provoking blog post. Please leave us your comments and feedback. Without further ado, here is Tessa’s contribution:

Some years ago, in his opening remarks at the CFR seminar in Boston, CFR President Rudolf Richter talked about how family sociology is or should be involved in public debate, and he concluded with the following words of C. Wright Mills“…the sociological imagination has its chance to make a difference in the quality of human life in our time.” As the first CFR month blogger, I want to pick up on that theme, and would like to continue the conversation about whether and how family sociology should be involved in public debate. Please post your comments and thoughts on this issue – the new media gives us the wonderful opportunity to engage in discussion outside of the regular face-to-face seminars.

In reflecting on current events in the world, like Richter, I also find myself returning to the classics. It somehow seems appropriate, having celebrated the 100th anniversary of his birth last July, to remember the work of Robert Merton, who coined the term the Matthew Effect (after the Biblical reference that to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away). As a family sociologist I tend to focus on how family shapes, and is shaped by the world – and at present it seems that the accumulation of advantage (power, social capital, wealth) that Merton wrote about is a constant theme.

Of course we cannot oversimplify and ascribe all social ills to the growing gap between the rich and the poor. But neither can we underestimate its effect. Take the recent unrest in Great Britain as an example. Explanations for what happened abound. Not surprisingly, these can be divided into the to-be-expected ideological lines; on the one hand those who, like Cameron, emphasize personal responsibility, and blame the actions of those who participated in the riots and/or looting on a lack of morality (or in Cameron’s words a “moral collapse”) – thus, in sociological terms, a sense of anomie, or normlessness. On the other hand the social critics blame the social structure of society, the growing gap between rich and poor. They reference a disenfranchised underclass, and recognize in many a sense of disengagement – or in more classical sociological terms alienation.

As a family sociologist, what really struck me was the way in which “family” was referenced in these discussions. Not surprisingly, the anomie-school blamed families for the behavior of the young people – dysfunctional or absent parents, families who do not socialize their offspring properly. In a variation on this theme some ascribed the looting to a consumer culture (perhaps societal values were too well taught!)

This reminded me of the old issue of family ideology – the traditional family seen as the ‘basic unit’ in society, or in Parsonian terms the institution responsible for primary socialization of children and stabilization of adult personalities. And if something goes wrong, family has somehow not fulfilled its obligation to society. Why does this old ideology persist? As family sociologists understand that there is a much more complex relationship between poverty and social problems. We realize that family is an institution to be supported and protected, rather than to be blamed for social ills. We understand, for example, that divorce and single parenthood are consequences of social and economic dislocations, and that in the neoliberal and minimalist state vulnerable populations are the ones most affected by social conditions – immigrants, women, the poor. Yet in society at large, except in a small handful of countries, the care of children and the elderly is constructed around conservative views of families, and if something goes wrong, families are blamed.

The theme of the 2012 ISA Forum is “Social Justice and Democratization” and the 2014 World Conference Theme is ”Facing an Unequal World: Challenges for a Global Sociology.“ In his vision of utopias for a global sociology, Eric Olin Wright, President-elect of the American Sociological Association pleads for a critical sociology which, he says, have three central tasks: first, the diagnosis of the social causes of the harms of society; second, the elaboration of alternative institutions and structures; and third, the development of a theory of transformation which tells us how to get from here to there.

So here are a few questions for discussion:

- Do you agree with Wright about the need for a critical sociology? Should we become engaged in macro-level sociological work? To what extent is a more critical view of family and household included in contemporary sociological models of society? As Jan Trost rightly points out in the last newsletter, RC06 is one of the most active research committees of the ISA – but does our work spill over to general sociology, or to theory-building on a more macro-level? Some of the most innovative work comes at the intersection of disciplines (as anyone who attended the seminar on Family and Memories will attest). At this point in history the intersection between family and collective behavior/social movements seems particularly relevant – or the intersection between family and modern media. What about the intersection between family and human rights? The list goes on…

- There has been much discussion about a public sociology – what is your view on this? Should family sociologists contribute to this discussion? How can we bridge the gap between our academic discourse and the public discourse of social policy, or should we, as Mills suggested, remain independent researchers? Do we have to be more vocal in our critique of views of family that are rooted in romantic notions of a mythical past? In England Cameron pledged to “mend society” – what role can and should family sociologists play in governmental attempts at social engineering around the world?