post modernist view:

Rapports:

• believe that there are 5 types of diversity: cultural, life stage, organisational, generational, social class.

• Diversity is a positive response to people’s needs.

Organisational diversity:

• Differences in the ways family roles are organised.

• For example, some couples have joint conjugal roles and two wage-earners, while others have segregated conjugal roles and one wage-earner.

Cultural diversity:

• Different cultural, religious and ethnic groups have different family structures.

• For example, there is a higher proportion of female lone-parent families among Afro-Caribbean households and a higher proportion of extended families among Asian households.

Social class diversity:

• Differences in family structure are partly the result of income differences between households of different social classes.

• There are class differences in child-rearing practices.

Life stage diversity:

• Family structures differ according to the stage reached in the life cycle.

• For example, young newlywed couples with dependent children, retired couples whose children have grown up and left home, and widows who are living alone.

Generational diversity:

• Older and younger generations have different attitudes and experiences that reflect the historical periods in which they have lived.

• For example, they may have different views about the morality of divorce or cohabitation.

Stacey’s view:

• More freedom and choice has benefited women.

• Women can now shape their family arrangements to fit their needs.

• Found women (rather than men) are the main agents in changes in the family.

• Divorce extended family - connection with former in laws.

• For example ex mother in law helping ex daughter in law to raise children or financial help.

• Shape of families depends on the active choices people make about their lives.

Giddens and Beck’s view:

• individualisation thesis

• Argue that traditional social structures have lost much influence over us - gender/class/family.

• We have become freed of traditional fixed roles such as being expected to marry and have more freedom to live our lives.

• ‘Standard biography’ has been replaced by a ‘do it yourself biography’.

Giddens - choice and equality:

• family and marriage have greater choice and are more equal between men and women.

• This is due to contraception allowing sex and intimacy (rather than reproduction) to be the main reason for the relationship's existence and because women have gained independence as a result of feminism, having greater opportunities in education and work.

• Argues past traditional family relationships were held together by external forces (laws holding the marriage contract, powerful norms against divorce and sex outside marriage).

• Now couples are free to define their relationship themselves rather than act out roles defined in advance by tradition.

• Couples nowadays don't have to marry to have children and divorce is readily accessible so they don't have to stay together 'til death do us part'.

Giddens’ - pure relationships:

• relationships no longer held up by law, religion, social norms or traditional institutions.

• Giddens describes a modern relationship as the 'pure relationship'.

• The key feature of the pure relationship is that it exists solely to satisty each partner's needs.

• Couples stay together because of love, happiness or sexual attraction rather than because of tradition, a sense of duty or for the sake of the children.

• Giddens notes with more choice, personal relationships are inevitably less stable, they can be ended more or less at will by either partner, rather than a permanent commitment. This in turn produces greater family diversity by creating more lone-parent families, one person households and step families.

Giddens - same sex couples:

• sees same-sex relationships as leading the way towards new family types and creating more democratic and equal relationships.

• They are not influenced by tradition and therefore have been able to develop relationships based on choice rather than on traditional roles.

• Enables same-sex relationships to negotiate personal relationships and to actively create family structures that serve their own needs, rather than having to conform to pre-existing norms in the way that heterosexual couples have traditionally had to do.

Beck:

• The previous patriarchal family provided a stable basis for family life ans each member's role and responsibilities were defined.

• But these have been undermined by greater gender equality and greater individualism, where people's actions are influenced more by calculations of their own self-interest than by a sense of obligation to others.

• negotiated family - does not conform to the traditional family norm but varies according to the wishes and expectations of its members who decide what is best for each person.

• We are now more aware of risks - making choices involves calculating the risks and rewards of the different options open to us.

• Zombie family: family appears to be alive but in reality it isn’t - people want it to be a haven of security it family can not provide this because it is unstable.

Weeks:

• Sexual morality has become a personal choice.

• Neither church or state can influence or control people’s lives.

• Younger generations have turned positively towards relationship diversity and tolerance has become widespread,