Families

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Families are an important environment for children to develop their experiences of relationships. They learn how to form effective relationships with others.

Families create a framework - how we feel about belonging and being an individual.

Families are often researched within developmental psychology. Topics such as how families effect individual intelligence, personality, well-being etc. Other psychological perspectives mostly ignore families as a research topic.

Other topics include child rearing (the mother/child relationship), failure of family (eating disorders, incest)

Research has attempted to link outcomes with causes within the family.

Much of the focus has been on young children, they're not considered to have subjectivity & agency as yet and are studied in the process of acquiring these.

BUT - Dunn, 2004, contests this. He sees children as active meaning-makers.

Some research has been on the transition from childhood to adulthood, adolescence. Forming individual identity, separating from parents Colemann 1990.

Heaven, 2001, considers peer group & influence of family on adolescent outcomes.

Psychology has also sought to identify if causes come from within or outside the family, but this needs definition of who is in the family and who is not a member.

Families are seen as distinct and separate from society in general - the effects one may have the other are often ignored.

Families are seen as static or universal but what happens in one family does not happen in others. they cannot be generalised.

Some accounts (feminist social psychology) challenge assumptions that social factors (gender, race, class) can be ignored when studying developmental psychology.Some of the assumptions made can be considered as situated knowledge. They were assumed to be true at a particular time or place.

Family roles, such as fathers, have been studied less.

Studies can be done from 2 perspectives:

PSP - in isolation - what happens within a family & how does it affect its members. Child development tends to study individuals and families separately.

SSP - families interaction with and influence as a part of society. How does society (processes, norms) affect families, and how do families affect society? In this perspective families are seen as dynamic, changing, less rigid, affected more by what happens around them. Example - Discourses.

Diversity is investigated, different structured families, what constitutes a family?

Individual - society & agency-structure dualisms involved

Power relations & situated knowledge too.

Social psychology should keep in mind how the social and individual interact - not just consider families in terms of individual relationships within them, but also consider the context (historical, social) that they are in.

Who makes up families? Are pets included?

A current view (discursive social psychology) friendships may be just as important as family relationships, maybe even more so. maybe because family members are often geographically distributed, not as close as they once were.