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.

2.2.1 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.

2.2.2 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 (C.) 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 find yourself as an outlier, differing from other members of your family, social group, or society?

2.2.3 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 whom we might see as different from us. You might easily see the differences between a family that has emigrated to the United States in the past ten 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 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; and
• how our families may be treated differently by the institutions and the society of the United States.

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, and what the differences are among what families experience in the United States.

2.2.4 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, our neighbors, and our 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, the United States.

2.2.6 References

Amato, P. R. (2019). What is a family? National Council on Family Relations. Retrieved December 31, 2019, from https://www.ncfr.org/ncfr-report/past-issues/summer-2014/what-family

Wright Mills, C. (1959). The sociological imagination. Oxford University Press. Retrieved December 31, 2019, from https://sites.middlebury.edu/utopias/files/2013/02/The-Promise.pdf