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Studying Marriage and the Family
Thinking Critically
Theories
Research Methods
Thinking Critically about
Marriage and the Family
• Our values, experiences and knowledge
influence our thinking.
• Using critical thinking helps us to
understand thinks clearly.
• Objectivity- Means to suspend the beliefs,
biases, or prejudices we have about a
subject until we really understand what is
being said.
• Opinions- are based on our own
experiences or ways of thinking.
• Biases- are strong opinions that may create
barriers to hearing anything that is contrary
to our opinion.
• Stereotypes- are sets of simplistic, rigidly
held, and overgeneralized beliefs about the
personal characteristics of a group of
people.
• Examples:
 Nuclear families are best.
 Stepfamilies are unhappy.
 Lesbians and gay men cannot be good parents.
 Latino families are poor.
 Husbands are henpecked.
• Fallacies- are errors in reasoning.
• egocentric fallacy- is the mistaken belief
that everyone has the same experiences and
values that we have and therefore should
think as we do.
• ethnocentric fallacy- is the belief that one’s
own ethnic group, nation, or culture is
innately superior to others.
• Instead of being presented with stereotypes
by age, sex, color, class, or religion,
children must have the opportunity to learn
that within each range, some people are
loathsome and some are delightful.
• Margret Mead (1901-1978)
Theories and Research Methods
• scientific methods- well-established
procedures used to collect information
about family experiences.
Theories of Marriages and
Families
• A theory is a set of general principles or
concepts used to explain data and to make
predictions that may be empirically tested.
• Research is found in journals that are peer
reviewed such as Journal of Marriage and
the Family, Journal of Family Issues,
Family Relations, Journal of Sex Research.
• Operationalization identifies how the
researcher measures the concepts. What
tools they use to gather the data.
• Variables- aspects or factors that can be
manipulated in experiments. Your marital
status, gender, age, social class, etc.
• Independent variables- are factors that can
be unaffected by other variables. age,
gender.
• Dependent variables- are factors that can
be affected by other variables.
Theoretical Perspectives on Families
• Symbolic Interaction Theory- a theory
that looks at how people interact with each
other. Symbolic interactionists, are
concerned with relationships.
• Interaction- a reciprocal act. Interactions
are the everyday words and actions that take
place between people. For an interaction to
occur, there must be at least two people who
react and respond to each other.
• Symbols- words or gestures that stand for
something else. When we interact with
people, we do more than simply react to
them. We interpret or define their symbols.
• Symbolic interactionism looks at how
people interact with one another,
communicating with symbols and gestures.
• Interaction is a reciprocal act that takes
place between people and uses symbols.
• Symbolic interaction tends to minimize the
role of power in relationships.
• It doesn’t account for the psychological
aspects of life, emphasizes individualism.
Social Exchange Theory
• Social Exchange Theory- we measure our
actions and relationships on a cost-benefit
basis. People maximize their rewards and
minimize their costs by employing their
resources to gain the most favorable
outcome.
• The Social exchange theory examines
actions and relationships in terms of costs
and benefits.
• In personal relationships, resources,
rewards, and costs are more likely to be
things such as love, companionship, status,
power, fear and loneliness, rather than
tangibles, such as money.
• Problems with social exchange theory
include: it has difficulty ascertaining the
value of cost and rewards; and values which
are assigned are highly individualistic.
Family Development Theory
• Family Development Theory- examines
the changes in the family beginning with
marriage and proceeding through a set
number of stages.
•
•
•
•
•
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1.
2.
3.
4.
6.
7.
8.
beginning family,
childbearing families,
families with preschool children,
families with adolescence,
families as launching centers,
families in middle years, and
aging families.
• The lives of all people involve response to
certain universal developmental challenges.
• The life cycle model gives insight into the
complexities of family life, circumstances
over time.
• Family development theory provides a
framework with which to view the
maturational development of individuals as
it influences and is influenced by the social
environment of the family.
• Critique is that this theory assumes the
sequential processes of intact, nuclear
families. It doesn’t take into account
childless families, divorce, single headed
households or lesbian headed households.
Many go through the same changes but the
length often varies.
Structural Functionalism
• Structural Functionalism theorizes about
how society works, how families work, and
how families relate to larger society and to
their own members.
• It examines how the family organizes itself
for survival and what functions the family
performs for its members.
• Structural functionalists encourage men to
develop instrumental traits and women to
develop expressive traits.
• Criticism of this theory include:
• 1. it cannot be tested empirically;
• 2. it is not always clear what function a
particular structure
• serves;
• 3. it has a conservative bias against change;
and
• 4. it looks at the family abstractly and has
little relevance to real families in the real
world.
Conflict Theory
• Conflict Theory- maintains that life
involves discord; society is divided rather
than cooperative.
• Conflict theorists view conflict as a natural
part of family life and not necessarily bad.
• Conflict theory recognizes four sources of
power; legitimacy, money, physical
coercion, and love.
• Criticisms of this theory include:
• 1. it fails to recognize the power of love or
bonding;
• 2. it assumes differences lead to conflict;
and
• 3. conflict in families is not easily measured
or evaluated.
Family Systems Theory
• Family Systems Theory-sees the family as a
structure of related subsystems.
• An important task of subsystems is
maintaining boundaries: When the
boundaries become blurred, the family
becomes dysfunctional.
• Family systems therapists and researchers
believe:
• (1) interactions must be studied in the
context of the family systems theory;
• (2) the family has a structure only visible in
its interactions;
• (3) the family is a purposeful system which
seeks homeostasis; and
• (4) despite resistance to change, each family
system is transformed over time.
• Many of the basic concepts of family
systems theory are still in dispute.
Feminist Perspective
• Feminist Perspective—is not a unified
theory. Gender differences are the orienting
focus in most feminist writing, research,
and advocacy.
• 1. Feminists maintain family and gender
roles have been socially constructed as
ways by which men maintain power over
women.
• 2. Feminists urge a more extended view of
family to include all kinds of sexually
interdependent adult relationships
regardless of the legal, residential, or
parental status.
• 3. Feminists campaign to raise society’s
level of awareness to the oppression of
women and associate their concern for
greater sensitivity to all disadvantaged
groups.
• 4. The feminist agenda is to attend to the
social context as it impacts personal
experience and to work to translate personal
experience into community action and
social critique.
• 5. The feminist perspective includes a
variety of viewpoints. These viewpoints
have an integrating focus relating to power
and the inequality of power prevailing in the
positions of men and women in society and
especially in family life.
Conducting Research on Families
• scientific methods- well-established
procedures used to collect information
about family experiences.
• quantitative research- is research that
deals with large quantities of information.
• Survey research and experimental research
are examples of quantitative research.
• qualitative research- research that is
concerned with a detailed understanding of
the object of study.
• secondary data analysis- It involves the
reanalyzing of data originally collected for
another purpose. Examples are analyzing
U.S. Census data and official statistics, such
as state marriage, birth, and divorce records.
• Survey research- uses questionnaires or
interviews, is the most popular datagathering technique in marriage and family
studies. Surveys may be conducted in
person, over the telephone, or by written
questionnaires.
• Clinical Research- involves in-depth
examination of a person or a small group of
people who come to a psychiatrist,
psychologist, or social worker with
psychological or relationship problems.
• Case-study method- consists of a series of
individual interviews, is the most traditional
approach of all clinical research.
• Observational research- scholars attempt
to study behavior systematically through
direct observation while remaining as
unobtrusive as possible.
Experimental Research
• Experimental research- researchers isolate
a single factor under controlled
circumstances to determine its influence.
Researchers are able to control their
experiments by using variables.