The Personal Life Perspective of the Family

What is the Personal Life perpective?

It takes an interactionist approach. Interactionists do not offer much of an opinion on whether the family is good or bad for us, as they are more interested in examining what family life means to the individuals within it and the ways in which family members interact with one another and create a shared culture.

What approach does the Personal Life Perspective take?

- It takes a 'bottm up' approach: looking at the meaning individual family members give their relationships. This contrasts with functionalism, Marxism and feminism, which take a 'top down', structural approach.

- By focusing on people' meanings, PLP draws attention to a range of other personal relationships, that are important to people even though they many not be conventially defined as (blood or marriage) 'family'.

- These include all kinds of relationships that individuals see as significant, and that gives them a sense of relatedness, such as relationship with same-sex 'chosen families', fictive kin, friends, dead relatives, even pets.

What does the reseach by Nordvist and Smart's (2014) suggest?

They suggest that donor-conceived children found that parents often emphasised the importance of social relationships over genetic ones in defining 'family'.