Approaches to the Study of Family Life: Practices, Context, and Narrative

Abstract

The focus of this book is on the study of change and continuity in families, issues that can be studied from many different perspectives, which in turn raise a variety of methodological challenges. Sometimes the emphasis of family life studies is at the microlevel: on the habitual and every day—the quotidian aspects of daily life. A particular challenge therefore is to understand how family practices change or stay the same. In other studies, or indeed in the same study, we also may need to make sense of microlevel contemporaneous data about family lives in the context of the specific times and places to which they refer. It is particularly important, for example, to analyze what may be assumed to be timeless social transitions—that is, the transition of young people from financial and emotional dependency on their families to greater independence—in relation to the opportunity structures available at a particular time and in relation to the social and geographical locations of young people and their families.