Family
Family – a complex social formation that may be considered both as a social institution and as a small social group.
Family as a social institution is a form of social organization that regulates the physical and spiritual reproduction of human beings, relations between spouses, parents and children, and other family members, creating systems of roles, sanctions, and standardized patterns of behavior.
When the family is studied as a social institution, attention is given to:
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public consciousness in the sphere of marriage and family relations, generalized characteristics of family behavior among particular population groups in different economic and cultural conditions, and the influence of social needs on the character of relationships and the family’s way of life;
- the causes and consequences of the insufficiently effective functioning of the institution of the family under certain conditions;
- the social mechanism through which family norms and values change;
- the effectiveness with which the institution of the family performs its basic functions in different political, socioeconomic, and cultural conditions;
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the relationship between ideal models of family norms and values and the actual behavior of family members, and so on (Lukashevych & Tulenkov, 2004, p. 217).
Family as a small social group is a community of people based on marital union and kinship ties, united by common activity and carrying out the reproduction of the population, the continuity of family generations, the socialization of children, and the maintenance of the existence of its members (Reana, 2010, p. 13).
Thus, as a social group, the classical family is a family with a marital core consisting of spouses, their children, and possibly other relatives.
There is a view that the family should be considered from the perspective of a triad of relationships: spousal, parental, and kinship relations. According to this view, the absence of at least one of these elements provides grounds for speaking of the fragmentary, or “broken-off,” character of the family. Thus, for example, married people who do not have children, or single-parent families, are proposed to be called family groups, so as not to distort the concept of the family. By family groups, in turn, they propose to understand a group of people who share a household and whose members are connected only by kinship, parenthood, or marital relations.
However, the number of families corresponding to the classical model – parents and their children – is gradually decreasing both in Ukraine and throughout the world. For example, according to forecasts, in the twenty-first century the share of classical families in the United States will not exceed 50 percent of the total number of such unions.
Indeed, family structure in the contemporary world is taking increasingly diverse forms. For example, a grandmother and an adult granddaughter who live together because of different life circumstances – the mother has died, the father has left for another family — may feel themselves to be a single whole and regard themselves as a family. The same may be true of a single mother, orphaned siblings, and similar forms of family life.
In addition, the family is usually associated with the performance of economic functions, such as household management; spatial proximity, such as a shared everyday life and co-residence; and the fulfillment of parental responsibilities by spouses. However, all these features are far from always present in the contemporary family (Reana, 2010, pp. 111–112).
For this reason, it becomes necessary to broaden the concept of the classical family. Thus, family as a social group may be understood as a contact group of relatives, or persons legally equivalent to relatives, who constitute a single whole and feel themselves to be a single whole. Accordingly, a guardian and the children adopted by him or her may also be regarded as a family (Reana, 2010, p. 110).
References:
Lukashevych, M. P., & Tulenkov, M. V. (2004). Sotsiolohiia. Zahalnyi kurs: Pidruchnyk [Sociology: A general course: Textbook]. Kyiv: Karavela. [in Ukrainian].
Reana, A. A. (Ed.). (2010). Semia: Psikhologiia, pedagogika, sotsialnaia rabota [Family: Psychology, pedagogy, social work]. Moscow: AST. [in Russian].
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