The personal life perspective on families

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AS level (Theories of the Family) Sociology AS - Families and Households Mapa Mental sobre The personal life perspective on families, creado por Em Maskrey el 09/03/2017.
Em Maskrey
Mapa Mental por Em Maskrey, actualizado hace más de 1 año
Em Maskrey
Creado por Em Maskrey hace más de 9 años
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Resumen del Recurso

The personal life perspective on families
  1. The personal life perspective argues that functionalist, marxist and feminist sociologists suffer from two weaknesses:
    1. 1. They tend to assume that the traditional nuclear family is the dominant family type, ignoring the increased diversity of families today.
      1. 2. They are all structural theories, assuming that families and their members are simply passive puppets, manipulated by society to perform certain functions. The personal life perspective argues that we do have some free will, and to understand the family today, we muse focus on the meanings its members give to their relationships and situations, rather than on the family's supposed functions.
      2. The sociology of the personal life perspective is a new perspective on families, strongly influenced by internactionist ideas, arguing that to understaand families, we must start from the point of view of the individuals involved, examining the meanings they give to their relationships. Unlike functionalists, marxists and feminists, who take a 'top down' approach, the personal life perspective takes a 'bottom up' approach, emphasising the meanings that individuals hold and how these shape their actions and relationships.
        1. Beyond ties of blood and marriage - As well as taking a bottom up approach to relationships, the personal life perspective also takes a wider view of relationships in general. They do not consider traditional family relationships based on blood or marital ties to be necessarily the most important. By focusing on individuals' meanings, they draw our attention to a range of other intimate relationships that are important to people, despite not being conventionally defined as 'family'. Examples of such relationships include relationships with friends, dead relatives, and even pets, alongside fictive kin and homosexual chosen families. These relationships can give the individual a sense of belonging and identity, and thus are very important, despite not being defined as 'family' by most.
          1. Donor-conceived children - Nordqvist and Smart's study on donor-conceived children explores "what counts as family when your child shares a genetic link with a stranger but not with your partner'. They found that the issue of blood and genes raises a range of feelings. Some parents emphasised the importance of social bonds over genetic ones in forming family bonds, with one mother stating that what makes a mother is the time and effort put into raising the child, rather than the cell the child starts off as. Nonetheless, difficulties could arise when physical similarities or differences between the parent and donor-conceived child were acknowledged. In addition, parents often wondered about the child's biological parent and any potential biological family is may have.
            1. The personal life perspective can be accused of taking too broad a view. Critics argue that by including a wide range of different kinds of personal relationships, we are ignoring the sanctity of relationships based on blood and/or marital ties.
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