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| Unrelated individuals who feel and are treated as if they were relatives. |
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| defined as one or more adults related by blood, marriage, or affiliation who cooperate economically, who may share a common dwelling, and who may rear children. |
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| consists of one or more people—everyone living in a housing unit makes up a household. |
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| A group of related families, is regarded as the fundamental family unit. |
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| A family consisting of mother, father, and children. |
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| A mostly middle-class version of the nuclear family in which women’s primary roles are wife and mother and men’s primary roles are husband and breadwinner. |
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| A legally recognized union between two people, generally a man and a woman, in which they are united sexually, cooperate economically, and may give birth to, adopt, or rear children. |
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| The practice of having only one spouse at one time. |
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| The practice of having more than one wife or husband. |
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| Modified Polygamy or Serial Monogamy |
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| A practice in which one person may have several spouses over his or her lifetime although no more than one at any given time. |
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| Having two or more wives. |
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| Having two or more husbands. |
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| Shaping individual behavior to conform to cultural or social norms. |
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| The common term for the family we form through marriage and childbearing. |
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| The family we form through living or cohabiting with another person, whether we are married or unmarried. |
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| The family in which we grow up, the family that orients us to the world. The family of orientation may change over time if the marital status of our parents changes. |
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| Consists not only of the cohabiting couple and their children but also of other relatives, especially in-laws, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. |
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| The social organization of the family. It is based on the reciprocal rights and obligations of the different family members, such as those between parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, and mothers-in-law and sons-in-law. |
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| Family relationships created through marriage. (The word conjugal is derived from the Latin conjungere, meaning“to join together.”) |
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| Consanguineous relationship |
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| Relationships created through biological (blood) ties—that is, through birth. |
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| To conservatives, cultural values have shifted away from individual self-sacrifice toward self fulfillment. This shift in values is seen as an important factor in changes in family life that occurred in the last three or four decades of the twentieth century. Conservatives recommend social policies to reverse or reduce the extent of such changes. |
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| Liberals tend to believe that the changes in family patterns are just that—changes, not signs of familial decline. The liberal position also portrays these changing family patterns as products of and adaptations to wider social and economic changes rather than a shift in cultural values. |
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| Share aspects of both conservative and liberal positions. Like conservatives, they believe some familial changes have had negative consequences. Like liberals they identify wider social changes as major determinants of the changes in family life, but they assert greater emphasis than liberals do on the importance of cultural values. |
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| To suspend the beliefs, biases, or prejudices we have about a subject until we really understand what is being said. |
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| A value judgment usually includes words that mean “should” and imply that our way is the correct way. An example is, “Everyone should get married.” |
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| is based on our experiences or ways of thinking. |
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| Strong opinions that may create barriers to hearing anything contrary to your opinion. |
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| Sets of simplistic, rigidly held, and over generalized beliefs about the personal characteristics of a group of people. |
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| Errors in reasoning. These mistakes come as the result of errors in our basic resuppositions |
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| Mistaken belief that everyone has the same experiences and values that we have and therefore should think as we do. |
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| The belief that one’s own ethnic group, nation, or culture is innately superior to others. |
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| Well-established procedures used to collect information about family experiences. |
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| Sets of general principles or concepts used to explain a phenomenon and to make predictions that may be tested and verified experimentally. |
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| The specification and definition of concepts used by the researcher. |
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| The identification and/or development of research strategies to observe or measure concepts. |
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| In deductive research, concepts are turned into variables. |
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| Concepts that can vary in some meaningful way. |
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| Predictions, about the relationships between marital status and other variables. We might hypothesize that race or social class influences whether someone is married or not. |
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| Factors that are affected by changes in the independent variable. |
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| Factors manipulated or changed by the experimenter. |
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| Variables that follow our independent variables and have direct effects on dependent variables. |
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| Begins with a topical interest and perhaps some vague concepts. As researchers gather their data they refine their concepts, seek to identify recurring patterns out of which they can make generalizations, and, perhaps, end by building a theory based on the data collected. |
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| Theories rooted in observations of specific, concrete details. |
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The emphasis is on how families are influenced by and in turn influence the wider environment.
The theory was introduced in the late nineteenth century by plant and human ecologists. |
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| Environment and Adaptation |
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| Initially used to refer to the adaptation of plant and animal species to their physical environments, these concepts were later extended to humans and their physical, social, cultural, and economic environments. |
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| Symbolic interaction theory |
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| Looks at how people interact with each other. |
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| Established patterns of behavior that exist independently of a person, such as the role of wife or husband existing independently of any particular husband or wife. |
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| Views of reality that couples construct and apply to account for why their domestic arrangement is other than they expected. |
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| According to social exchange theory, we measure our actions and relationships on a cost-benefit basis. People maximize rewards and minimize costs by employing their resources to gain the most favorable outcome. An outcome is basically figured by the equation: Reward – Cost = Outcome. |
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| Exchanges that occur between people have to be fair, to be balanced. |
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| Family development theory |
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| Emphasizes the patterned changes that occur in families through stages and across time. |
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| A theory that explains how society works, how families work, and how families relate to the larger society and to their own members. |
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| Major institutions, such as the family, religion, government, and the economy. Each of these structures has a function in maintaining society, just as the different parts of a tree serve a function in maintaining the tree. |
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| Holds that life involves discord. Conflict theorists see society as divided, with individuals and groups in conflict with each other. |
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| Combines structural functionalism and symbolic interaction, to form a psychotherapeutic theory. |
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| Blending some central ideas of conflict theory with those of Interactionist theory, feminists critically examine the ways in which family experience is shaped by gender—the social aspects of being female or male. |
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| The social aspects of being female or male. |
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| Research that deals with large quantities of information that is analyzed and presented statistically. |
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| Research concerned with a detailed understanding of the object of study. |
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| Involves reanalyzing data originally collected for another purpose. Examples might include analyzing U.S. Census data and official statistics, such as state marriage, birth, and divorce records. Also includes content analysis of various communication media such as newspapers, magazines, letters, and television programs. |
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| Family science researchers conduct their investigations using ethical guidelines agreed on by professional researchers that protect the privacy and safety of people who provide information in the research. |
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| Insists that no one, including the researcher, can connect particular responses to the individuals who provided them. |
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| The researcher promises not to reveal information publicly. |
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| Gather information from a smaller, representative group of people and to infer conclusions that are valid for a larger population. |
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| 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 problem. |
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| Consisting of a series of individual interviews, is the most traditional approach of all clinical research; with few exceptions, it was the sole method of clinical investigation through the first half of the twentieth century. |
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| Scholars attempt to study behavior systematically through direct observation while remaining as unobtrusive as possible. |
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| Researchers isolate a single factor under controlled circumstances to determine its influence. |
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