Tag: families

The global decline in fertility rates: causes and consequences

The global birth rate is declining due to various factors such as economic insecurity and high living costs, leading to concerns about an ageing population and economic strain on welfare systems. Attempts to boost birth rates through government policies have had limited success. Family-friendly policies and immigration are suggested solutions, but social trends are hard to reverse.

Birth rates are dropping almost everywhere. Two-thirds of the world’s population now lives in countries where the total fertility rate (TFR) – a measure of births per woman per lifetime – has dropped below 2.1, the number needed to keep the population constant. 

According the to World Bank Open Data, the global TFR reached 2.3 in 2021; it will soon drop below the 2.1 replacement rate if it hasn’t already. 

In the Europe and the UK the rate stands at 1.5 and 1.49 respectively. In East Asia, it is 1.2 and Latin America 1.9. 

As recently as 2017 the UN was predicting the world’s population would climb to 11.2 billion by 2100. The UN now predicts it will peak at 10.4 billion in 2080. After this point it will start declining. This is from 8 billion today. 

UN population predictions

This decline could, in fact, happen decades earlier. 

This will be the first such global-population decline since the Black Death in the Middle Ages. ‘The demographic winter is coming’ said Jesus Fernandez- Villarde of the University of Pennsylvania. 

Why is the birth rate dropping?

This could be due to problems such as increasing economic insecurity, and the high cost of living, especially housing and childcare. 

However fertility rates almost always come down when nations reach a certain level of economic and social development. This is known as ‘demographic transition’.

How do patterns vary globally?

Declining fertility used to be seen as a rich countries problem and to some extent it still is. The highest fertility rates in the world, of around five or six births, are in sub-Saharan countries such as Niger, Angola, and DRC. But now even poorer states have seen sharp falls in their fertility rates. In India, for example, the TFR fell to 2 in 2020!

graph showing declining fertility rates in different regions

Why are people worried?

There are two main concerns. 

People are having fewer children than they want. Polls suggest that UK women on average want between two and three children. 

Second is the consequences for the dependency ratio. The dependency ratio is the number of people of working age relative the number of people not of working age (children and retired people).

A shrinking population means that more jobs will go unfilled and economic dynamism will reduce. The most immediate fear is that welfare systems will be underfunded. They rely on working age people to fund them, after all. 

Today the G7 richest economies have roughly three people of working age for everyone one over 65, but by 2050 they will have fewer than two. 

In South Korea, the national pension fund is expected to run out of cash by 2055. South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world at 0.72.

Can birth rates be boosted?

Governments are trying but nothing has been very effective. 

Japan has experimented with childcare subsidies and stipends since the 1990s. Its fertility rate climbed from 1.26 in 2005 to 1.45 in 2015. But then sank to 1.2 again by 2023. 

South Korea has invested a staggering $270 billion in fertility initiatives since 2006 but its birth rates keep declining. 

In France Macron has offered better paid parental leave and fertility check ups. However this hasn’t changed anything.

Hungary has had some success. It spends 5% of GDP trying to prop up the birth rate. It provides three years of parental leave to mothers and lifelong exemption from income tax for women who have a child before aged 30. And loans of $36K which are written off for couples who have at least three children and a subsidised minivan.  And free IVF to women, but not single women or lesbians. Hungary’s birth rate has increased from 1.2 in 2011 to 1.5 today. 

Extreme right-wing policies boost birth rates

In Romania inn 1966 NC decree 770 removed contraception from sale and abortion was restricted, the fertility rate jumped from 1.9 to 3.7 within a year. 

Do family friendly policies help?

Some of the world’s lowest fertility rates are in nations where women play an important role in the workplace, but where traditional gender roles have endured, and where there has been little provision for maternity or paternity leave. 

For example, Japan, South Korea, Italy (1.2) and Taiwan (0.8) all have very low birth rates.

But eventhe most family friendly nations have low fertility rates such as Finland (1.32) Norway (1.4) and Sweden (1.45) 

It seems the social trends behind low fertility are hard to reverse. 

Other solutions to sort out the dependency ratio

Immigration is one possible solution to the ageing population. However the numbers would have to very large to solve the problems. We’d need net migration to be 500 000 a year in the UK for several years to maintain the current ratio of working age to dependent people.

A second solution is to plan for a smaller, older population. This must involve adopting technological solutions such as automating as many job roles as possible.

Signposting

This is relevant to the families and households module, usually taught in the first year of A-level sociology.

This post serves as an update to trends in the birth rate, in global perspective.

It is also relevant to the consequences of an ageing population.

Are Single People Discriminated Against…?

The number of single people has increased over the last several decades. However, there is still something of a stigma attached to being single. Society seems to still be geared towards couples and families as the ‘normal’ social unit. Single people are often overlooked and some sociologists suggest single people may be discriminated against. 

This is according to a recent Analysis podcast on Radio 4. 

The main reason for the increase in single people is women’s liberation. Women now have higher levels of educational achievement than men and are more likely to be in work. Women are more likely to choose to live alone, and more likely to seek divorce. Of divorced people, men are twice as likely than women to recouple. Many more older women live alone than men. 

Are single people discriminated against?

Some of the ways single people may be discriminated against include:

It is more expensive to live alone. SIngle person households spend 92% of their disposable income on necessities such as housing costs, food and bills. This compares to only 83% of disposable income spent by couples. 

Letting agencies tend to discriminate against single people. They prefer couples because there are two incomes coming in, which they think is more secure. 

Employers and employees expect more from single people as workers. The default view is that single people have fewer commitments outside of work than people with families. Thus it is single people who are expected to work odd hours or at the weekends if required. 

Many holidays are geared towards couples, with single rooms often being the most inferior. 

Getting engaged, married, or having children are seen as social markers of progress. Being single is just kind of overlooked. 

You rarely hear single people talked about in the news, and they are rarely the focus of social policy. There is a lot of talk and policies aimed at helping families, for example, but rarely anything for single people. 

An exception to this was during lockdown. The government announced that people living alone could form support bubbles with people in other households. This was one of the few times single people were explicitly mentioned in social policy. 

Single women living alone are seen in a negative light. We have the spinster stereotype for example. 

All of this is a problem when single people are a diverse group. There are many routes into singledom. 

One of the ways social policy could adapt to single people is by allowing single workers time off to look after friends or pets.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This material is mainly relevant to the families and households module.

How Motherhood and Fatherhood affect paid and domestic work

mothers are more likely to take time off work and do 10 hours more housework and childcare than fathers.

One of way of measuring the relative effects of motherhood and fatherhood on paid and domestic labour is to compare the following two subsets:

  • Mothers in relation to women without dependent children compared to
  • Fathers in relation to men without dependent children.

Comparing these two subsets would be a useful contribution to evaluating Liberal and Radical Feminist theories about how family life affects women. Broadly speaking:

  • Liberal Feminists claim that family life (compared to women remaining childless) has little or no negative impact on women.
  • Radical Feminists claim that family life has a negative impact on women, as women are more likely to quit their jobs when children are born, and they end up doing more childcare than men, and continue to do more housework too, suffering from the triple shift.

Generally speaking if mothers are doing less paid work and more domestic work than women without dependent children, while fathers are doing more paid work and less domestic work than men without dependent children, it’s reasonable to say this suggests more support for radical compared to liberal feminism.

HOWEVER, we’d still need to do further research to test this out: statistics don’t give us in-depth data and allow us to conclusively prove or dismiss either of these broad theoretical positions, they just point in one direction or the other.

This post looks at the following data taken from the ONS’ (1)

  • The percentages of mothers, fathers and men and women without dependent children in employment
  • The percentage of mothers in full time work by age of child
  • The percentages of 24-35 year old mothers and fathers in work.
  • How much housework mothers and fathers do.

You can view all of the stats below on my Tableau page.

Motherhood and fatherhood encourage traditional gender roles

The graphic below shows the percentages of mothers, fathers and men/ women without dependent children in paid employment 2002-21, U.K.

In 2021 72% of men without dependent children were in work compared to 92% of fathers. 69% of women were in work compared to 76% of mothers.

So… both men and women with children are more likely to be in work compared to those without children (but this data also includes retired people, so no surprise, maybe!)

What’s interesting is the relative difference between men and women without children and mothers and fathers:

Mothers are much less likely to be work than fathers, the figures for men and women without children in work are much closer together.

This suggests having children is more likely to result in women leaving paid employment to take on a caring role while having children encourages men into the breadwinner role.

Only 30% of women with new born children work full-time

Bar chart showing percentage of mothers in full time work by age of child.

It’s probably unsurprising, but only 30% of women with very young children aged one, and the percentage increases gradually until 49% of women with 18 year olds are in paid employment.

This is a clear trend of women taken a period of employment and then gradually returning in greater numbers as their children get older.

The figures for men hardly change at all with children being born (not shown on graphic).

Young women are affected most

This statistic is the strongest evidence of how motherhood has a detrimental affect on women’s careers compared to fatherhood.

bar chart comparing number of young mothers and fathers in work, UK 2022.

For 24-35 year olds, MORE women without dependent children are in paid work than men.

However, only 69% of 24-35 year old mothers are in employment compared to a massive 92% of fathers in the same age category.

Women do more housework and childcare

In 2022 women did 30 minutes more unpaid housework per day than men and they did one hour extra of childcare.

Over the course of a week, this means women with dependent children are doing 10 hours more childcare and housework combined than men.

This seems to be strong evidence of mothers suffering from the triple shift.

Conclusions: support for radical feminism?

The above statistical evidence seems to offer some support for the radical feminist view that families are harmful to women, in that having children results in women being more likely to take time off paid-work compared to men and mothers doing 10 hours more domestic labour and childcare per week than men.

Sources and Signposting

This material is most relevant to the families and households module, usually taught as part of the first year A-level sociology course.

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

(1) Office for National Statistics: Families and the Labour Market UK, 2021.

Screenshots of Tableau embeds:

women and men in paid work
bar chart showing hours per day childcare and domestic labour done by mothers and fathers, UK 2022.

Analyse two ways in which family diversity has been influenced by government policies

This question came up in the AQA’s November 2021 7192/2 topics paper, in the families and households section.

This post includes some advice on how to interpret the item and answer the question.

Applying material from Item C, analyse two ways in which family diversity in the
UK has been influenced by government policies (10)

item for AQA' 10 mark question A-level sociology

Using the item…

The item in this case is very short and also a bit tricky, directing you to ‘aspects of diversity’ rather than policies.

TWO types of increasing diversity…..

  • more divorced families….
  • more same sex couples.

The item then refers to government policies more generally.

So what this seems to be directing you to do is to talk about a range of policies in relation to increasing divorce and the increase in same sex couples.

As with any question it’s probably a good idea to not have too much overlap, so try to apply different policies to both types of diversity.

Policies relating to increasing divorce

  • The divorce act of 1969 led to a rapid increase in divorce, changing the grounds (you should include details of this). However divorce had been increasing before the act and continued to increase after the act so clearly there were social changes contributing rather than just the policy.
  • The 1984 divorce act made divorce possible after a shorter period of marriage, there was an immediate spike in that year, so clearly this made a difference.
  • Benefits for single parents make it easier for women to get divorced in families with children so they are not as financially dependent on men, apply terms such as breadwinner/ role/ carer role and Feminism.
  • The equal pay act of 1975 – women equal pay to men, more financial independence, same logic as above.
  • This is crying out to be evaluated… divorce has been going down for 20 years, one of the reasons is immigration (still a policy), immigrants have lower divorce rates.
  • Maternity and paternity pay may have helped ease (lower) the divorce rate as these take pressure off young families.
  • Final evaluation – it’s probably more about social changes and social policy changes reflect that!

Polices relating to an increase in same sex couples

  • The civil partnerships act 2004 made it legal for same sex couples to get a civil partnership, same basis as marriage, reduced stigma, increases number of formally partnered couples.
  • Same sex marriage act 2013 enabled same sex couples to get married, further reducing stigma.
  • Analysis point: possibly the number hasn’t increased, just the amount of openly gay couples.
  • Adoption Act (2004) made it legal for same sex couples to adopt children on same basis as opposite sex couples, increase in same sex families.
Signposting and related posts

For more information on how to answer exam questions please see my exams and essay writing advice page.

AQA mark scheme for this November 2021 paper.

Net migration to the UK increasing!

Net migration to the UK reached 600 000 in December 2022, up more than 50% since December 2018.

graph showing net migration to the UK 2018. to2022

Since Brexit net migration from the EU has been declining, with around 50 000 more EU Citizens leaving the UK than entering; and the increase in net migration is driven entirely from non-EU countries, especially Nigeria, Bangladesh and India.

Reasons for Migration to the UK

The main reason for the recent increase in migration is more people coming to study in the UK, and much of that is driven by the dependent partners and children of students coming to join them.

After that, work is the main reason, with people coming in the take up jobs in sectors of our labour market where there are vacancies, such as health and social care and seasonal agricultural work.

bar chart showing reasons for migration to the UK 2018 to 2022

2022 also saw more humanitarian sources of migration with more than 100 000 refugees come to the UK from the Ukraine and more from Hong Kong.

Analysis

Immigration is a sensitive political issue, with 60% of the UK population thinking it is too high according to YouGov tracking (2).

However it is also clear that we need immigration to fill gaps in the job market and a lot of the increase from 2021 to 2022 was about doing just that.

Also, very few people believe we took in too few refugees from Ukraine so people are not outright opposed to migration.

Finally, the figures are somewhat skewed by students coming the UK to study for three years, and bringing their dependents…. most of these will return home after study, and while they are here they are paying huge fees to British universities which should benefit the UK economy: they are basically paying to be here!

From a policy perspective, however, such levels of net migration to the UK are the highest on record, which suggests a profound failure of government policy given that every PM since 2010 has been elected on the promise of bringing net migration down, which simply hasn’t happened.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This material is primarily relevant to the demography topic, which is part of the families and households module.

Sources

Census UK (accessed May 2023) Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending December 2022

(2) YouGov: attitudes to immigration tracker.

Legal Age for Marriage Raised to 18

The legal age of marriage in the UK rose from 16 to 18 years of on Monday 27th February 2023.

The reason behind this was to protect vulnerable teenagers aged 16 to 17 being manipulated or coerced into marriage against their will.

There have been thousands of cases of forced marriage in recent years where children, many from Asian backgrounds, have been taken out the United Kingdom shortly after their 16th birthdays and made to perform marriage ceremonies to men they have never met before.

This is usually arranged by their elderly family members without the child’s prior knowledge and can sometimes result in the child returning home weeks or months later already pregnant and with her new husband.

Preventing forced marriage of children is one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and marrying off a child agains their will is a breach of international human rights.

With this change to the legislation, 16 and 17 year olds are now brought under similar levels of protection against harm as we find with the laws forbidding alcohol and cigarettes.

A recent BBC News article explored this issue from the experience from the point of view of two victims of arranged child marriage, one of whom pointed out that at age 16 she didn’t realise that she was being coerced and that it should have been the duty of every adult to safeguard her.

This new law should make teenagers much less likely to go through this as most parents will not be prepared to break U.K. law for the sake of tradition.

Relevance to A-level Sociology

this material is a useful update to the marriage and divorce topics and childhood topics within the families and household option, usually taught as part of the AQA’s A-Level sociology in the first year of study.

Sources/ Find out More

The Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act 2022.

How Has the SmartPhone Impacted Intimate Relationships?

The majority of couples in longer term relationships use their smart phones primarily to ‘keep base’ with the partners during periods when they are not together, and manage to successfully negotiate rules to minimise the use of their phones when they are together.

However, for a minority of couples excessive Smart Phone usage when together can drive the couple apart due to jealously with one partner not knowing what the other person is doing when they are on their phone.

This is according to Mark McCormack, Professor of Sociology at the University of Roehampton, who recently completed some research on this topic based on In-depth interviews with 30 people all of whom had been in heterosexual relationships for at least one year.

The sample included a wide range of ages, social class backgrounds and ethnicities. 

Below I summarise this research which is most relevant to the Families and Households module.

Keeping Couples Together when Apart and Driving them Apart when Together

Smartphones are an integral part of contemporary relationships – especially at the start of relationships. 

Private messaging on apps such as WhatsApp was especially important in the early stages of relationships (the ‘dating phase’) when someone’s chat skills were one of the factors that determined whether or not there would be a second, third, or fourth (and so on) date… 

Later on in relationships smartphones were essential for ’keeping base’ with couples who either weren’t living together or who just had long work days. 

The idea that smart phones prevent intimate couple conversations because both partners are hunched independently over their phones when in at home or in a restaurant (for example) emerged as something of a myth… 

Rather, one participant said that she didn’t know what couples used to talk about before SmartPhones seeing them as essential to keeping conversations going by checking in on what was going on elsewhere (keeping up with the gossip, maybe, for example). 

One third of respondents had done flirtatious texting, fewer had sent over more explicit material such as videos – but a significant minority said their phones helped them keep intimate when apart and helped them view sex in a different (enhancing) way. 

For a minority of participants phones had the potential for undermining trust, especially among younger females. 

Some felt that the  the phone sometimes got in the way of face to face conversations with their partners and there was some feelings of jealousy and worrying about what partners were doing online when they weren’t speaking to them. 

A few of these respondents expressed concern about the fact that the delete button is so easy, easy to hide one’s tracks online, but very few people spoke of their partners actually cheating as a result of being online.  

McCormac developed the concept of ‘Technoference’ to describe one further negative impact of phones on relationships – when phones disrupt face to face intimate conversations. 

One respondent talked of being so into Candy Crush at times that she wasn’t following conversations properly.  Another talked of playing games on hist phone behind his girlfriend’s heads while giving her a hug. 

A further downside was the experience of sitting in bed together but living in different worlds – her on FaceBook and him on a Sports App. 

a couple using their phones while on a date.

Over time messages got less exciting in nature, and less frequent, and more about mundane things such as reminders about what to pick up from the supermarket, but ‘checking-in’ quickly remained constant. 

One respondent saw these quick and infrequent check-ins as sad given that in the early days of the relationship her and her partner had been exchanging a lot more texts and images 

Some respondents also talked of sex having been interrupted to answer a phone call – or using their smartphones as a strategy to delay or avoid sex. 

Many respondents had developed strategies to manage their smartphone use when together. A couple of examples of rules included buying alarms for the bedroom so phones couldn’t come up less drastic was the no phones at candle lit dinners rule.

A minority of respondents felt the conversation about management had itself caused tensions – with one partner feeling the other was trying to be more controlling. 

Ultimately, communication was seen as they key for successfully negotiating smartphone usage in intimate relationships.

Find out More:

The full research article is here: Keeping couples together when they’re apart and driving them apart when they’re together, but thanks to the totally unreasonable accessibility limitations you often get with academic articles, you have to request access so this isn’t freely available.

However you can listen to a summary of the research on this excellent Thinking Allowed Podcast, which I listened to and summarised in the form of this blog post.

Relevance to A-level sociology 

This is most relevant to the families and households module, and is a good example of how relationships are changing in a postmodern world due to technology. 

This is also a good example of in-depth micro-level research and the results demonstrate how we can’t understand the impact of technology on couples and relationships without asking people.

It also shows how couples are active agents I their lives – most seem to have been able to use smartphones to positively enhance their relationships, and to have negotiated strategies to avoid the potential negative impacts. 

So this study is a good-fit with perspectives which argue that postmodern family life is complex, diverse, negotiated – such as the late modernist Ulrich Beck and his idea of the negotiated family as the norm, and also the Personal Life Perspective. 

Image Source.

How has increased choice in personal life affected family structures in the UK today?

This question recently came up on the June 2022 A-level sociology exam paper two, the families and household topic.

It was one of the 10 mark questions which linked to an item, as follows:

‘People have more choice today than in the past over who they can be in a personal relationship with. They also have more choice when a relationship ends.

This increased choice in personal life has affected family structures in the UK today’.

Then the question: Applying material from Item C, analyse two effects the increased choice in personal life has had on family structures in the UK today.

How to answer this question

It should be quite easy to spot the two hooks in the item:

  • choice over WHO one can be in a relationship with.
  • choice over when the relationship ends.

So these are going to form the basis of your two points and the fact that the question refers to ‘family structures’ in the plural gives you plenty of options to develop each point.

Although be careful not to repeat yourself too much!

AND REMEMBER – THERE ARE NO MARKS FOR EVALUATION IN THESE 10 MARK WITH THE ITEM QUESTIONS!

Suggested answer

The answer below should get 10/10.

The fact that there is more personal choice over WHO one can be in a relationship with (as it says in the item) means there is more diversity in partnerships today.

In the 1950s the vast majority of couples were heterosexual leading to the norm of the cereal packet family, one man, one women and their children.

With the increasing acceptance that sexuality is a matter of personal choice, however, there are now a higher proportion of openly gay couples, however despite the law changing so that adoption agencies cannot discriminate against non-heterosexual couples, gay couples are still much less likely to have children than heterosexual couples, which is a change in family structure.

It’s not just sexuality over which people have more choice – people are more free today to get involved intimately with people from other ethnic backgrounds, meaning there are more ethnically mixed families today.

And people can also choose more long distant relationships with people in other countries, meaning families are more stretched globally.

It’s not just about partners either, people have more choice over whether or when to have children, meaning there are more childless families.

A second way people have more choice in relationships is ‘when to end them’ as it says in item C. This ties into Ulrich Beck’s concept of the negotiated family – because relationships are now a choice, people have to spend more time negotiating the rules of family life, such as whether they should get married and what ‘structure’ that family might take (how many kids to have, or whether to have them at all, for example, which has resulted in more diversity of family structures with increasing amounts of co-habitation, and childless families for example, but also still many families having children.

It also ties into Giddens concept of the pure relationship – people are in a relationship for the sake of the relationship, not because of tradition or a sense of duty – this means, because being in a relationship is now a choice, that they can end if just one person isn’t happy.

This in turn can lead to more relationship breakdowns and there are more step-families today and complex relationships such as the Divorce Extended Family identified by Judith Stacey – where it is mainly women who make the effort to keep in touch which ex-partners and children.

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How has Increased Life Expectancy Affected the Experience of Childhood…?

Life expectancy in England and Wales has risen dramatically over the last 100 years, increasing from around 55 in 1920 to 80 today for men and from 60 to 83 today for women. …

This means that children who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s would, on average, not have had the experience of being around many people over the age 60, whereas today, on average, children will experience the company of people aged 60-85 as ‘the norm’.

I am talking here of course just about ‘averages’ – experiences will vary from family to family.

For those parents who have children at a younger age, say in their 20s, their children stand much more chance of experiencing a four generation family, something which would have been almost unheard of in the 1920s.

However, three generation families would still have been common 100 years ago because people typically had babies much earlier, meaning children would still have experienced grandparents, but those grandparents would have been younger, in their 50s rather than in their 70s which would be the case in the typical three generation family today.

I think with the increase in family diversity, the increase in life expectancy would mean different experiences with grandparents for children depending on the type of family… for those parents who have children young then children are far more likely to experience grandparents in good health for their entire childhood and maybe only have to deal with their death as older teenagers, whereas experiencing the death of a grandparent during childhood would have been much more common 100 years ago.

HOWEVER, for those parents who have children later, in their 40s, probably dealing with the death of a grandparent would be more likely.

A possible negative affect of the ageing population on the experience of childhood is that parents who have to care for their ageing parents may not have as much time for their children, especially if end of life care is dragged out for several months or years as can be the case with degenerative diseases which are more common in old age.

The experience of childhood may also have been indirectly affected by wider social changes brought about by the ageing population – as society has refocussed its resources towards caring for the old (some might even say pandering to the old) there are relatively fewer resources left for children, so funding in education suffers as does Higher Education with students now having to pay for it themselves.

So as children get older they may start to feel like society is set up for the old and they get very little back in return – other than facing a life of working for 50 years as young adults in order to pay for the ever increasing ratio of old to young (the ‘dependency ratio’).

We kind of saw this with the Covid-19 pandemic – society was focused on protecting the very old while schools just closed – the children suffered for the sake of the old – the experience of childhood here was one of blocked opportunities and increased fear and uncertainty caused, effectively by the government’s choice to put the over 70s first – had the Pandemic happened in the 1920s when there were hardly any over 60s alive anyway society wouldn’t have had to shut down to protect them, because the risk of dying from covid for the under 60s was significantly lower.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This question cam up in the June 2022 families and households paper two exam.

This is a response I free wrote in around 15 minutes to give students some ideas about how they might have answered it. NB it’s not formatted like an answer to a 10 mark question should be, but there is enough information in here to top band I would have thought – there are certainly TWO ways fleshed out!

The relationship of the family to the social structure and social change

The pre-release information for the 2022 A-level sociology exam from the AQA selected the relationship of the family to the social structure and social change as the topic area that WILL come up for the 20 mark essay.

NB we are talking here about the Paper 2 exam: topics in sociology the families and households option, and this post is just a reminder of the core content that comes within this sub-topic!

What is the social structure?

The idea of a social structure is most commonly associated with the two classic sociological perspectives Funtionalism and Marxism:

  • Functionalists argue that society is structured through institutions which all perform specific functions, all working together to maintain the whole system of society – like organs in a body (the ‘organic analogy’) – the family is seen as playing a crucial role in (obviously?) the reproduction of the next generation.
  • Marxists see the social structure as being organised along social class lines – with the bourgeoisie exercising control over the major institutions of society
  • Feminism has a more complex view of the social structure whether you’re talking about Liberal, Marxist or Radical.
  • Postmodernists and Late Modernists suggest the social structure which Marxists and Functionalists refer too is much more fluid than it used to be and that it constrains the individual much less today than in the late 19th and mid 20th centuries when Marxists and Functionalists did most of their writing.

Recent social changes you might consider….

The social changes associated with the shift from modernity to postmodernity are what you could address, such as:

  • Globalisation
  • The breakdown/ increasing fluidity of social structure
  • More individual freedom and choice

The relationship of the family to the social structure

The ‘classic’ approach to this topic is to address it through the main sociological perspectives, and if you know what the different perspectives think about the family and social structure, you SHOULD automatically be addressing social change at the same time, as the two are fundamentally related.

The rest of this post offers a brief summary of what the main sociological perspectives have to say on this topic.

for further details and especially evaluations be sure to check out the linked posts below!

The Functionalist view on the family and social structure

Talcot Parsons developed the Functional Fit Theory to explain how the main type of family changed from the extended family to the nuclear family with the shift from pre-industrial to industrial society.

He argued that the nuclear family better fitted the needs of an industrial society because it was smaller and more mobile, and the changes with industrialisation meant that families needed to be able to move around more easily.

He also argued that the family in industrial society had to perform fewer functions than in industrial society because other institutions developed to perform functions more efficiently than the old extended family could – schools for education, for example.

The family in industrial society performs only two functions – the stabilisation of adult personalties (emotional security) and reproduction.

Find out more here: The Functionalist view of the family.

The Marxist view of the family and social structure

This stands in direct contrast to the Functionalist view – the nuclear family emerges with industrialisation, according to Engles, but only to legitimise the passing on of property down to the next generation – with Capitalism, there are now wealthy people and the family unit makes sure their new wealth stays in the family.

Before Capitalism Engles argued that families were a kind of ‘promiscuous hoard’ – when there was no property people cared for children collectively – it’s only when SOME families have property under capitalism that the nuclear family emerges.

Later Marxists suggest the nuclear family continues to perform functions for Capitalism by becoming a unit of consumption, for example.

Find out more: The Marxist Perspective on the Family.

The Radical Feminist view on the Nuclear Family

Radical Feminists see the nuclear family as the main institution which keeps Patriarchy going.

The traditional nuclear family and the ideology of the housewife role for women keeps women in the domestic sphere and out of the work place, preventing them from developing financial independence and limiting them to a caring role and a life of dull-drudgery.

Moreover, women are effectively exploited with the nuclear family, and far from the family being a safe haven, domestic abuse within family life is a common, yet hidden feature of many relationships.

A core belief of radical feminism is that the nuclear family needs to be broken down and women are better off seeking alternative relationships.

Find out more: The Radical Feminist View of the Family.

Post and Late Modernism

Writing since the 1980s, Postmodernists argue that there is no such thing as a normal family anymore – rather, family diversity is now the norm – with there being more variety of families than ever before – as shown by the increase in single person households and single parent households for example.

For postmodernists, every aspect of family life is a choice – and hence we see people getting married and starting families later and divorce rates persistently high.

Late Modernists suggest it is not as simple as family life being all about choice – rather social life today makes holding down a relationship and having a stable family life more difficult – people still want these things, but busy working lives and constant distractions make family life much more difficult.

Find out More

This has been just a quick reminder post, be sure to check out the linked blog posts for further details.

Be sure to check out the New Right and Personal Life Perspective too!

Also, remember that the specific question you get asked could be either broad or very narrow, AND the 10 mark questions will probably be from other areas of the module!