• For 2022 data about family structure, check out “The Modern American Family: Key Trends in Marriage and Family Life” with data collected by the Pew Research Center in 2023.
• To delve into additional data and read more about how age affects employment and families, read “If You’re Over 50, Chances Are the Decision to Leave a Job Won’t Be Yours,” a data analysis by ProPublica and the Urban Institute.
• Explore mixed racial and ethnic identities with Megan Kimberly Smith and Jazmine Jarvis on the website Mixed in America.

• Listen to their full podcast interview with Taylor Nolan.

• To understand more about the treatment of people who were enslaved and strategies for maintaining White dominance, read Boundless U.S. History’s chapter about the treatment of enslaved people, including sexual abuse.
• If you’d like to read more about the development of the Constitution, click here.
• To read a summary of the U.S. Supreme Court case that affected interracial marriage, click here.
• To learn more about how immigration laws affect families of people who immigrate to the United States:

• Wikipedia provides a list of major immigration laws from 1790 through 2012.
• In this article in The Atlantic, more recent laws and practices are discussed.

1. How does the social construction of difference contrast with a social construction?
2. If you could add a third image in Figure 1.3, what television family would you choose and why?
3. How is equity different from equality and fairness?
4. What are the big demographic family trends in the United States, and how is your own family similar or different?
5. What is the “nostalgia trap”? What are “separate spheres”? How do they relate to today’s families?
6. What is a social identity? Can you describe your own social identity via your roles, characteristics, and groups you belong to? Do you have any intersectional social identities?
7. How does intersectionality relate to equity?
8. How has the government affected the structure of kinship and family? Families with which social identities have been most affected by this social structure?

These terms are needed to understand the concepts in this chapter and will appear in other chapters in the text.

• Collectivist society: a societal viewpoint that focuses on meeting the needs and goals of all members of a community rather than focusing on individual successes.
• Comparative approach: within the fields of anthropology and sociology, the act of examining and contrasting social processes and institutions with a view to draw inferences and understand patterns.
• Demographics: statistical data about particular groups and changes in trends within the overall population.
• Equity: ensuring that people have what they need in order to have a healthy, successful life that is equal to others. This is different from equality in that some may receive more help than others in order to be at the same level of success.
• Individualistic society: emphasizes the needs and success of the individual over the needs of a community.
• Intersectionality: an approach originally advanced by women of color that finds it critical to look at how identities and characteristics (such as ethnicity, race, and gender) overlap and influence each other to create complex hierarchies of power and oppression.
• Kinship: the social structure that ties people together (whether by blood, marriage, legal processes, or other agreements) and includes family relationships.
• Nuclear family: a family group that consists of two parents and their children living together in one household.
• Private function of families: focuses on the intimate relationships of family members. Being a part of a loving relationship that will last forever, or an indefinite amount of time, is seen as a core part of being a family member.
• Public function of families: focuses on contributions to society such as the production of children or caring for others.
• Separate spheres: a binary, gender-based ideology that emerged during the industrial period that stated women were best suited for home and domestic work while men were best suited for public work.
• Social characteristic: describes traits that may be biologically determined and/or socially constructed. Examples include sex, gender, race, ethnicity, ability, age, sexuality, nationality, first language, and religion.
• Social construction: meaning assigned to an object or event by mutual agreement (explicit or implicit) of the members of a society; can change over time and/or location.
• Social construction of difference: hierarchical value assigned to perceived differences between one socially constructed idea and another. Class, race, and other hierarchies based on social identity are social constructions of difference.
• Social identity: a person’s sense of self as defined by and in relation to the combination of social characteristics, roles, and groups to which they belong.
• Social structure: the organization of institutions within society; this affects the ways individuals and families interact together.
• Standard North American Family (SNAF): a family group that consists of two parents and their children living together in one household.

In this introductory chapter, you’ve learned about social constructions. Figure 1.29, an 11-minute video, explores this topic more deeply. The video includes examples of our society’s social constructions, including symbols such as the flag and human characteristics such as gender and race.

https://youtu.be/Kg4MThXJpnc

Discussion Questions

1. Choose one example of social construction from the first seven minutes of the video that most surprised or intrigued you. Explain how you know that the concept is socially constructed and what interested you about this example.
2. In the last four minutes of the video, the social constructions of gender and race are discussed. Choose either gender or race to apply to your own or your family’s life. In what ways can you relate to the social construction of gender or race?