In Togo, a West African nation that lies between Ghana and Benin, the term family is broadly defined. A family is more than a husband, a wife, and children. Blood relatives of both spouses are considered part of the family, and the extended family embraces all relatives, living or dead. There is a strong cultural belief that ancestors, also called the living dead, are spiritually in contact with t…
Within the family life-cycle literature, the addition of a first child to the marital system is considered one of the stages that a family will likely experience during its developmental lifetime. For the couple experiencing the birth of a first child, this change is one of most unsettling, but most common, examples of change within a marital relationship. Indeed, having a baby has been ranked as …
Since the mid-1960s, there has been increasing appreciation for the importance of the family environment in understanding normative child development and child maladjustment. In their search for theoretically sound and empirically testable hypotheses about family functioning and its impact on children, researchers have found a rich resource in the work of family systems theorists and therapists. A…
Trust in an intimate partner or family member occupies a central place in a rewarding and successful relationship. Consistently, trust is regarded as one of, if not the, most important component of a loving relationship (Regan, Kocan, and Whitlock 1998), and international studies have found trust to be a critical factor in the success of long-term marriages (Roizblatt et al. 1999; Sharlin 1996). I…
The family is both the strongest social institution in Turkey and the foundation that supports the twin pillars of tradition and adaptation. The durability of marital unions, coupled with pressures for mutual commitment and obligation, contribute to this family stability. In 2001, for example, Turkey experienced a serious economic crisis, but despite severe levels of unemployment, rampant inflatio…
Like aunt, uncle is not a universal kinship term. In Hawaii, for example, there is no uncle term because mothers' and fathers' brothers are included in the same category as father (Keesing 1975). Generally, however, uncle refers to a mother's brother, a father's brother, or the husband of one's aunt. In English-speaking countries, all of these relatives are lumpe…
Unemployment is widely regarded as a major social and economic global problem. When referring to someone as unemployed, most people have in mind a state consistent with the International Labour Office's (ILO) definition, namely a person who does not have a job, is available for work, and is actively looking for work (ILO 1998). This is certainly the case for government agencies, like the Bu…
The first family system in America was that of the native peoples. This was actually a kinship system rather than a family system, for despite the wide variety of marital, sexual, and genealogical customs found in several hundred different cultures, most early Native-American groups subsumed the nuclear family and even the lineage in a much larger network of kin and marital alliances. Kinship rule…
Urbanization, in conventional terms, refers to the process through which society is transformed from one that is predominantly rural, in economy, culture and life style, to one that is predominantly urban. It is also a process of territorial reorganization in that it shifts the locations, as well as the characteristics, of population and production activities. Typically, urbanization is defined by…
Venezuela is located on the northernmost tip of the South American continent. Its shoreline opens to the Caribbean Sea. The Venezuelan territory encompasses a portion of the Andes mountains chain, the Maracaibo Lake, and the Orinoco River basin and contains the regions of Guayana, Amazonia and the Plains. The capital city is Caracas. Venezuela has a wealth of raw materials—iron, asphalt, ba…
In both ancient and modern Vietnam, the family is considered the foundation of society. Grounded in Confucianism, the traditional patriarchal family was viewed as the basic social institution in which the welfare of the extended family outweighed the individual interests of any member. For Ho Chi Minh, the nation's revolutionary hero, the security of the state was rooted in the stability of…
Families are widely recognized as the "most basic institution within any society, because it is within [families] that citizens are born, sheltered, and begin their socialization" (Ambert 2001, p. 4). The importance and centrality of family is accepted across cultures. Families both influence and are influenced by the wider societies in which they exist. Violent societal-level confli…
The ring could be the oldest and most universal symbol of marriage. There are many accounts of the meanings behind the use of wedding rings but the actual origins are unclear. The ring's circular shape represents perfection and never-ending love, and in the seventeenth century social pressure led to the preference of gold as the material because it does not tarnish (Ingoldsby and Smith 1995…
Losing one's mate is among the most stressful of all life events. It presents painful adaptational challenges to spouses and families. The loss dramatically marks the transition to widowhood and impacts an increasing proportion of the diverse aging population. Worldwide evidence shows a broad range of responses to widowhood. Cross-cultural variations among marital survivors reflect the chan…
A wife is a female partner in a marriage. Most cultures recognize this common social status with a specific affinal kinship term. In most times and places, women have been expected to become wives at some point following the commencement of their childbearing years. The stage at which this happens varies greatly, however, as does the social role a wife plays within a family and her legal rights an…
Women's movements are among the most global of modern social movements. From nineteenth-century Canadian women's suffrage campaigns to recent direct actions for sustainable development in India, wherever women's movements have been established, national organizations and local grassroots groups have worked together for the interests of women and girls. Varied, even conflicting…
Because the two most important roles in life for many people are work and family, understanding the relationship between the two is crucial. Although work and family research in the 1960s and 1970s primarily focused on dual-career families and working mothers, research in the 1980s evolved into a multidisciplinary and multitheoretical area of study. Today researchers are still interested in the in…
The 22 million Yoruba who live in southwestern Nigeria are one of the four major sociolinguistic groups of contemporary Nigeria. The others are the Igbo to the east, and the Hausa and Fulani to the north. Subgroups of the Yoruba in Nigeria include the Awori, the Ijesha, the Oyo, the Ife, the Egba, the Egbado, the Ketu, the Ijebu, the Ondo, the Ekiti, the Yagba, and the Igbomina. These subgroups ha…
Zambia is a landlocked African country. Its population in 1995 was about 7.4 million. The average number of children in a Zambian family is about 6.5. The country occupies about 0.752 million square miles and has a density of fifty-four persons per square mile. …