Social Conflict Theories of the Family

Abstract

Almost 15 years ago, the senior author of this chapter and another sociologist, Joyce Elliott Foss, presented a paper entitled, “In Search of the ‘Missing’ Conceptual Framework in Family Sociology: The Social Conflict Framework,” at the annual meetings of the National Council on Family Relations (Farrington and Foss, 1977). The central thesis of this paper was that it was finally time to “officially discover” the social conflict approach to the study of the family—an approach that seemed to us to be very much implicit within and relevant to the field of family studies. It was our sense that all of the necessary ingredients for such an approach were present and that most of the really difficult work of laying out the parameters of the successful application of principles and concepts of a social conflict perspective on social reality to the study of the family had already been accomplished. All that was really left to do, in our opinion, was to formally recognize the value and the legitimacy of this approach—as had been done systematically with a variety of other theoretical approaches in previous works (Christensen, 1964; Hill and Hansen, 1960; Nye and Berardo, 1966)—and to put it in its rightful place as one of the most important and useful of the theoretical perspectives available to students of the family.