Sociology of the Family: Variety, Diversity, and Change Flashcards

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards generated from the Sociology of the Family lecture notes and readings, covering key terms, historical developments, methodologies, and sociological theories.

Private Family

A social arrangement defined as two or more individuals who maintain a close, emotional relationship and a durable commitment to each other, where individuals find intimacy, love, loyalty, and support.

Public Family

A family definition consisting of one or more adults who are jointly taking care of dependents, and the dependents themselves, emphasizing services provided and costs imposed on society.

Externalities

The costs and benefits accruing to parties who are not directly involved in a transaction or social activity.

Public Goods

Things that almost everybody can enjoy or consume without paying for their production, such as children raised and educated by families to contribute to society.

Homogamy

The social pattern described as "like marries like," where individuals marry spouses with similar social, economic, or demographic characteristics.

Heterogamy

The marriage pattern defined as the "marriage of opposites," where individuals marry spouses with contrasting characteristics.

Boundary Ambiguity

A situation within families where members disagree on who is or is not included in the family.

Voluntary Kinship

Family ties formed through voluntary connections among non-co-resident individuals who are not related by blood, marriage, or adoption.

Living Apart Together

Childless, marriage-like romantic relationships in which partners reside in separate households.

The Na

An ethnic minority group in China that operates without formal institutions of marriage or biological fatherhood, practicing strict matrilocal residence and courtship through furtive night visits.

Coverture

A legal doctrine under which a woman's legal identity and rights were completely subsumed under those of her husband upon marriage.

Married Women's Property Act (1848)

New York State legislation that granted married women the legal right to hold title to property separately from their husbands.

Separation of Spheres

A 19th-century gender ideology dividing life into a male public sphere of commercial market labor and a female domestic sphere of moral caretaking at home.

Positive Statement

A descriptive, factual statement that describes what is currently the case without incorporating moral judgments or values.

Normative Statement

A statement anchored in values, morals, or norms that asserts what ethically or socially ought to be the case.

Objectivity

The goal of drawing scientific conclusions directly from empirical data regardless of personal opinions, beliefs, or values.

Falsifiability

The standard requiring that a statement or hypothesis must be capable of being disproved by empirical data to be considered scientific.

Intersubjectivity

The scientific criterion requiring that different researchers analyzing the same empirical evidence arrive at the exact same conclusion.

Reproductivity

The criterion in science stating that independent researchers collecting new evidence using the same methodology arrive at the same conclusion.

Functional Approach

A sociological framework that analyzes how specific features of family structures and practices contribute to social cooperation and societal stability.

Conflict Theory

A sociological framework analyzing how family structures and social practices reflect, enforce, or perpetuate power differentials and inequality.

Exchange Theory

An analytical approach in sociology and economics viewing family behavior as the result of self-interested choices, trade-offs, and rational gain maximization.

Gender Role Behavior

Socially determined behavioral scripts and expectations associated with being male or female within a given society.

Doing Gender

The social process through which individuals create and reinforce differences between men and women in daily interactions that are not biological or essential.

Absolute Poverty

A measure originally created to evaluate food insecurity, calculated in the United States as earning less than $3 \times$ the cost of the economy food plan.

One-Drop Rule

A historical legal classification in several U.S. states ($1910$–$1967$) designating any person with any detectable African ancestry as legally Black.

Hypodescent

An informal societal practice of assigning children of mixed racial parentage the social classification of the minority parent.

Endogamy

The social tendency or practice of individuals marrying strictly within their own social, racial, or cultural group.

Patrilocality

A post-marital residential pattern in which a newly married couple lives with or near the husband's family of origin.

Matrilocality

A post-marital residential pattern in which a newly married couple lives with or near the wife's family of origin.

Neolocality

A post-marital residential pattern in which a newly married couple establishes an independent household separate from both sets of parents.

Conjugal Household

A nuclear family household structure consisting strictly of a married or partnered couple and their children.

Polygyny

A form of polygamy involving a marital structure where one man is married to multiple wives simultaneously.

Polyandry

A form of polygamy involving a marital structure where one woman is married to multiple husbands simultaneously.

Life-Cycle Service

A pre-industrial social practice in which young people left home to work as domestic servants or apprentices to save money and prepare for adult marriage.

No-Fault Divorce

A legal regime enabling marital dissolution without requiring proof of wrongdoing by either spouse, first enacted in California in $1969$.