Sociology of Families

Change, Continuity, and Diversity

NEW TO THIS EDITION:

• A new chapter on Family Violence examines child abuse and neglect, intimate partner violence, and elder abuse. Utilizing research statistics, the chapter identifies the cultural and structural norms that create conditions for family violence.
• Chapter 7 is dedicated to childhood, enabling students to examine how ideologies of childhood have changed over time, how children are socialized, and how children's experiences of childhood are shaped by race, class, and gender.
• Chapter 8 explores changing parenting ideologies such as how parenting is gendered, raced, and classed, as well as the unique experiences of immigrant and LGBTQ parents.
• Significant revisions and updates throughout the nine other chapters include cutting-edge sociological thinking about U.S. families, the most recent data and statistics, and expanded coverage of how families are impacted by structural inequalities.

• Rather than creating a separate chapter on changes in the family as a social institution, the themes of change and continuity are carried throughout the book. This format encourages students to consider both the ways that contemporary families have changed and the ideological and behavioral threads that link today’s American families with those of the past.
• Gender, sexuality, race, and social class are discussed in every chapter, enabling students to apply these factors to their study of families. For instance, the “Marriage and Cohabitation” chapter looks at marriage rates for different racial and ethnic groups; how the breakdown of social distance among groups is increasing rates of interracial marriage; and the connections between social class markers (education, occupation, income) and marriage markers.
• Chapter 2 is devoted to four different approaches to defining “family,” and demonstrates how our ideas about family shift when we move extended families to the center of analysis.
• Chapter 3 surveys the main theories and methods used by sociologists to study families and provides a strong foundation for the remainder of the text.
• Chapter 4 considers the topics of first sexual experiences and romantic partnerships in the larger context of the transition to adulthood.
• The author provides a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data, in the form of tables and graphs, to support her arguments about family change and continuity.