2.2 How and Why We Study Families
Elizabeth B. Pearce
Families and kinship are of great interest to most, if not all, people. We all have a family, whether or not that family meets the socially constructed definition of family that is common in the United States or our own definition of family.
Objective and Subjective Views
Sociologist Paul Amato separates family into objective and subjective definitions (Amato, 2019). The objective definitions are often provided by governmental structures. Employers, schools, and agencies also rely on these definitions. Subjective definitions are both richer in context and more complicated to explain. This includes your own definition of family. When we are discussing equity and families, we must attend to the subjective definitions. Because it is only by measuring the experiences of all families in the United States that we can really perceive how privilege, power, and discrimination affect families.
Using Your Sociological Imagination
We study families in order to better understand ourselves. When we can see our own family within the greater context of the experiences of other families and societal influences and trends, we understand ourselves better. Being able to relate your own experiences to these greater forces and interactions with the world is called the sociological imagination.
Sociologist Charles Wright Mills created this term in 1959 in order to help explain the ways that the field of sociology contributes to both everyday life and academia (Wright Mills, 1959). Throughout this course and this text you will be given opportunities to develop your sociological imagination. Ask yourself how your own family’s experiences relate to the broad trends and events in this country. Where do you fit? Or do you find yourself an outlier, differing from other members of your family, social group, or society?
Learning about Others
We also study families in order to better understand other families and society. In this way we recognize both the uniqueness of each family and the ways in which groups share identities and experiences. Let’s say that you feel familiar with the experience of a rural student family, because you are a student and you live in a rural community. You may be able to speak very eloquently to the challenges students are facing today and what living in a rural setting means about your access to education, medical care, healthy food, and transportation. At the same time, you cannot speak for all rural student families, because every family has a unique history and set of circumstances that affects their lives. So part of your job in studying families is to listen and understand how those other rural student families experience life.
Simultaneously we study families to understand the circumstances and experiences of families that we have never met. It’s even more important to listen to and understand families we might see as different from us. You might easily see the differences between a family that has immigrated to the United States in the past 10 years as compared to a family made up of people who have lived in the United States for several generations. Could you imagine living in a country that uses a different language than what you grew up speaking? Or vice versa? While we might quickly identify those kinds of differences, we need to study more deeply to understand at least two other themes:
- How our families share similar love, goals, and needs.
- How our families may be treated differently by United States institutions and society.
The greater our ability to comprehend each other’s experiences, the more likely we will be able to better understand how families are similar in what they need and what they do, as well as what the differences are among family experiences in the United States.
Families and Social Structure
We study families in order to understand how they interact with other social structures within the United States. There are a variety of definitions for social structure, but they all include the idea of “structure,” an ordered arrangement or pattern, and the idea of “social,” which denotes individual persons or groups, such as tribes, families, or religious organizations. In this text, we will focus on the living, changing aspect of social structure, especially large social organizations that affect families, such as the media, the government, and the health care system.
We study families to make a difference in our everyday lives: to better understand our own families, neighbors, and friends. Studying families also helps us in our work lives. All of us will work with a diverse group of individuals, all of whom have families. Whether you are a teacher who influences the next generation, a business owner who coordinates benefits for your employees, a marketing director who designs advertising campaigns, a computer programmer who creates code, or a social worker who helps people solve life problems, you will both work alongside a group of diverse individuals who have families, and you will have clients, consumers, or customers who are members of this diverse country.
Using an Equity Lens to Study Families
The title of this text, Contemporary Families: An Equity Lens, may lead you to wonder what an equity lens is. In Chapter 1, we described the difference between equality and equity, focusing on equity (ensuring that each person or family has what they need). An equity lens helps us to consider how actions can translate into equity for all. Lane County, Oregon defines it this way on its website:
A racial equity lens is a set of questions we ask ourselves when we plan, develop or evaluate a policy, program or decision. Using an equity lens will help us identify potential impacts on institutionally under-served and marginalized individuals and groups, and to identify and potentially eliminate barriers.
The purpose of an equity lens is to be deliberately inclusive as we make decisions and to support us as we strive towards more equitable outcomes.…An equity lens will not tell us what action to take. Rather, the lens helps us discuss and reflect on equity considerations as we act and make decisions (Lane County, 2016).
How does this relate to you, a college student? You are already an actor in your own family and community. You may coach your child’s volleyball team or serve on the student council. Perhaps you volunteer for a local agency that serves the houseless or children who have been abused. You make decisions every day about whom you say “hello” to, whom you smile at, and whom you sit next to in class. All of these decisions have the power to effect change when you think about them from an equity lens.
In this text, we will provide historical and cross-cultural context related to families’ varied experiences but focus on the current status of families in the United States. An equity lens is applied throughout the text as we take a structural diversity approach to understand what families need, how and whether those needs are met, the role that social structures play in family outcomes, and the ways that individuals and families can make a difference.
You will also see thinking related to critical theory and critical race theory (CRT), which also examines institutions and power structures. In the short video in figure 2.1, Megan Paulson defines CRT, then goes on to talk about the positive effect on students of all races and ethnicities when they have usable terms and language to talk about what they experience in terms of difference in their daily lives.
It is the intent of the authors of this text that students use what they learn in this class to better understand their own experiences and the experiences of others. Discussion in face-to-face and online environments is encouraged. This text examines what families need and how institutions and society can support or get in the way of those needs. This will lead to a better understanding and analysis of how existing social processes and institutions contribute to family inequity.
Comprehension Self Check
Licenses and Attributions for How and Why We Study Families
Open Content, Original
“How and Why We Study Families” by Elizabeth B. Pearce. License: CC BY 4.0.
All Rights Reserved Content
Figure 2.1 “A Minute and Over: Critical Race Theory” © PhillipsAndover. License Terms: Standard YouTube License.
References
Equity lens. (n.d.). Retrieved February 8, 2023, from https://lanecounty.org/government/county_departments/county_administration/equity_access_and_inclusion/equity_lens
the social structure that ties people together (whether by blood, marriage, legal processes, or other agreements) and includes family relationships.
influenced by personal experiences and opinions.
ensuring that people have what they need in order to have a healthy, successful life that is equal to others. Different from equality in that some may receive more help than others in order to be at the same level of success.
the unequal treatment of an individual or group on the basis of their statuses (e.g., age, beliefs, ethnicity, sex).
the organization of institutions within society; this affects the ways individuals and families interact together.
the state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
can include the aim, goal, or intention of an action; a long-term guiding principle; the impact our life has on the world.
a structural framework, explanation, or tool that has been tested and evaluated over time.
the categorization of humans using observable physical or biological criteria, such as skin color, hair color or texture, facial features, etc.