Sexual orientation is defined by the sex of those to whom a person is attracted. In most societies, people are classified as homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, or asexual. Heterosexual is the term applied to those attracted to the other sex; homosexual covers those attracted to the same sex; bisexual applies to those attracted to both men and women; and asexual individuals profess to no sexual at…
Shyness refers to passivity, emotional arousal, and excessive self-focus in the presence of other people ( Jones, Cheek, and Briggs 1986). It also frequently involves negative self-evaluations, social avoidance, and withdrawal. From a practical point of view, the importance of shyness derives from its consequences. Shy persons, for example, are often excessively uncomfortable and anxious in social…
Relationships with extended kin, spouses, parent and child, and siblings are all affected by a changing social world. Family size (one indicator of sibling structure) is shrinking in many societies. The International Database of the U.S. Bureau of the Census (2001) reports an all-time low of 2.76 children per woman, down from 4.17 in 1960. Growing up with fewer siblings (or none, as is mandated in…
Sikhism originated in the Punjab region, in northwest India, five centuries ago. It is the youngest of all independent religions in India, where the Sikhs are less than 2 percent (1.8%) of India's one billion people. What makes Sikhs significant is not their numbers but their contribution in the political and economic spheres. The global population of the Sikhs is approximately 20 million, …
Single-parent families can be defined as families where a parent lives with dependent children, either alone or in a larger household, without a spouse or partner. There was a rapid and drastic increase in the number of single-parent families in the latter half of the twentieth century. This change has been used by some to argue that we are witnessing the breakdown of the family (defined as a marr…
Just as the age at first marriage has increased over the past few decades, so too has the proportion of adults living together outside of traditional marriage, as well as the number of men and women who are delaying or forgoing marriage. This has resulted in a great number of men and women spending a significant amount of their adult years single. The U.S. Census Bureau (1999) reports that between…
Marriage and family have always been considered fundamental social values among the Slovak population. Nearly 90 percent of all inhabitants consider the family to be the most important value in their lives (European Values Study 1999/2000). This feeling was formed under the strong influence of Christianity (according to the last census in 2001, 69% of all inhabitants are Roman Catholic). Approxima…
The Social Exchange Framework was formally advanced in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the work of the sociologists George Homans (1961) and Peter Blau (1964) and the work of social psychologists John Thibaut and Harold Kelley (1959). Over the years, several exchange perspectives, rather than one distinct exchange theory, have evolved. The exchange framework is built upon the combination of the …
Socialization is not a process unique to childhood. According to the sociological theory known as symbolic interactionism, socialization is required for each new role an individual acquires over the life-course. Nevertheless, most of us generally understand socialization to mean the process of creating socially responsible beings out of primarily asocial beings—that is, infants and children…
Married couples and families do not exist in isolation, but are embedded in a network of social relationships and culture. Even prior to marriage, relations with family members, friends, and acquaintances can influence dating activities and romantic relationships. When individuals become a couple, they must deal with the demands of both their own social ties and those of their spouses. Couples inf…
Social inequality is a fundamental characteristic of the fabric of society. Rich or poor; advantaged or disadvantaged; privileged or underprivileged: each contrast speaks to differences among people that are consequential for the lives they lead. Whether in describing patterns of inequality or examining the consequences of inequality, the results depend upon how inequality is conceptualized and me…
South Africa, with its 40 million residents, is a multicultural society with eleven official languages. Although most residents (76.7%) speak an indigenous African language (Xhosa 23.4%; Zulu 29.9%; and Sepedi 12%), English is the language that most people understand (Statistics South Africa 1996). Family life must thus also be seen against the background of cultural diversity and extreme socioeco…
The Spanish family has been undergoing dramatic changes that started in the 1980s. These changes have influenced not only patterns of interaction, but also society's broader values regarding marital and family life. To understand these changes, it is important to study these families in their immediate social and larger historical context. …
Although spanking is a term familiar to most parents, it may be defined differently depending on our personal circumstances. For some, spanking may refer to one or two flat-handed swats on a child's wrist or buttocks, but would not include a beating with a whip or a belt. For others, spanking also includes slaps and pinches to the leg, arm, back, or even the head, as long as no marks are le…
Over the past two decades, violence by an intimate partner has become identified throughout the world as a serious physical and mental health concern. Spouse abuse, in particular, was recognized, at the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 as a human rights concern worldwide. Various terms are used to characterize the violence between intimate partners. For example terms such a…
Stepfamilies consist of at least one minor child who is living with a biological parent and that parent's spouse—a stepparent—who is not the child's other biological parent. According to Larry Bumpass, James Sweet, and Teresa Castro Martin (1990), approximately one-half of all marriages are a remarriage for at least one partner. In 1992, 15 percent of all children in th…
Stress research includes attention to events or conditions that may cause harm and to the responses aroused by those stressful events or conditions. These outcomes include felt distress, disrupted interaction, and poorer health. The overall stress process includes both stressful agents and stress outcomes (see Pearlin et al. 1981). This process also includes two other major sets of variables: soci…
Jennie McIntyre (1966) was the first scholar to discern the curious paradox of structural functionalism (SF) within the realm of research and theory about families. Although only a relatively few researchers in the 1960s labeled themselves as SF-types, the great bulk of published work in the study of families was, she noted, shaped by SF assumptions, perspectives, and views of the social world. Sh…
Substance abuse has a substantial and reciprocal impact upon families. There are many definitions of substance abuse and dependence but two authoritative sources are the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV-TR) (American Psychiatric Association 1994), commonly used in the United States, and the tenth edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) (World…
Increases in the employment of mothers of young children have focused attention on the issue of substitute care (sometimes called nonmaternal care) of young children. In the United States, nearly 60 percent of all women with infants are in the paid labor force (Bachu and O'Connell 2000), and the majority of these children begin nonmaternal care prior to the age of four months for an average…
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) was first defined in 1969 as "The sudden death of any infant or young child, which is unexpected by history, and in which a thorough post mortem examination fails to demonstrate an adequate cause for death" (Beckwith 1970, p. 18). New definitions have since been suggested, but they have not been internationally accepted (Guntheroth 1995; Byard 2001…
The word suicide covers a wide range of behaviors, including (1) completed suicide; in which the individual dies as a result of the self-destructive act; (2) attempted suicide, in which the individual survives the act; and (3) suicidal ideation, which refers to the individual thinking about and planning suicidal behavior, but not putting these thoughts into action. A controversy exists over the te…
Surrogate motherhood is one of many currently available forms of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) that have developed in response to the increasing number of individuals/couples who find themselves unable to conceive a child on their own. Surrogate motherhood involves the services of a woman who agrees to carry/gestate a child for the express purpose of surrendering that child to the inte…
Switzerland is a highly segmented society. Marital behavior, divorce, and fertility have varied significantly by language regions and religious denomination. In addition, regional differences in family law and social policies, which are strong due to the far-reaching autonomy of the cantons (administrative and geographic units analogous to states or provinces), have played an important role in thi…
Symbolic interactionism is a sociological perspective on self and society based on the ideas of George H. Mead (1934), Charles H. Cooley (1902), W. I. Thomas (1931), and other pragmatists associated, primarily, with the University of Chicago in the early twentieth century. The central theme of symbolic interactionism is that human life is lived in the symbolic domain. Symbols are culturally derive…
Television has long been like a member of the family. In some countries televisions occupy almost every room, and family members are exposed to it from infancy. It baby-sits, educates, gives comfort, and tells us what family life should be like. Even though most people do not consider television a major part of their lives, it is an inescapable part of modern culture. Television itself is not easi…
Temperament is defined as biologically based individual differences in emotional and motor reactivity, attention, and self-regulation (Rothbart and Bates 1998). Temperament is an aspect of personality that is seen in human infants and in other animals; it constitutes the core of the developing personality. Temperamental characteristics are dispositions or capacities; temperament is not seen contin…
In general, couples therapy has been shown in dozens of studies to be more effective than no treatment (for meta-analyses of these studies, see Baucom et al. 1998 and Shadish et al. 1993). Although most couples are helped by therapy, less than half end up in the nondistressed range (Shadish et al. 1993). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the therapies with the most support are behavior…
Family scholars have traditionally been interested in the role of time in shaping the organization of family experience. Anthropologists who studied families in preindustrial cultures were interested in the way that families lived their lives according to the temporal rhythms of nature, with the tides, the seasons, and the movement of the sun giving structure to everyday life. Although different t…