Families and Households

• Nuclear Family: A household run by a married heterosexual couple and their two children.
• Primary Socialisation: First stage in the process of learning the culture in your society; takes place within the family.
• Triple Shift: Unpaid domestic labour, paid work and emotion work
• Radical Feminism: Form of feminist theory that believes that gender inequality is the result of male domination in all aspects of social and economic life.
• Marxism: the economic and political theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that hold that human actions and institutions are economically determined and that class struggle is needed to create historical change and that capitalism will ultimately be superseded
• Functionalism: A broad perspective in sociology and anthropology which sets out to interpret society as a structure with interrelated parts. Functionalism addresses society as a whole in terms of the function of its constituent elements; namely norms, customs, traditions and institutions. A common analogy presents these parts of society as "organs" that work toward the proper functioning of the "body" as a whole.
• Marxist Feminism: explains both victimization and criminality among women in terms of gender inequality, patriarchy, and the exploitation of women under capitalism.
• Liberal Feminism: Form of feminist theory that believes that gender inequality is produced by unequal access to civil rights and certain social resources, such as education and employment, based on sex.
• Polygamy: Having more than one spouse at a time
• Neo-Conventional Family: Differs form the convential family e.g dual earner
• Infant Mortality Rate: the number of deaths in the first year of life for every 1,000 live births
• Fertility Rate: the average number of children a woman of childbearing years would have in her lifetime, if she had children at the current rate for her country
• Birth Rate: the ratio of live births in an area to the population of that area
• Life Expectancy: The average number of years an individual can be expected to live, given current social, economic, and medical conditions. Life expectancy at birth is the average number of years a newborn infant can expect to live.
• Aging Population: population in which the percentage of those over 65 years is increasing
• Monogamy: marriage to only one person at a time
• Serial Monogamy: a succession of short monogamous relationships (as by someone who undergoes multiple divorces)
• Conjugal roles: The roles played by a man and woman (traditionally husbands and wives) in a domestic setting i.e. the home. It particularly focuses on the 'domestic division of labour' i.e. who does what jobs in the home. It is the expected behaviour of husbands and wives.
• Instrumental role: the position of the family member who provides the family's material support and is often an authority figure (traditionally taken by a man)
• Expressive role: the emotional role of providing a supportive home for a family (traditionally taken by a woman)
• Symmetrical family: Both partners take on both roles in the households e.g. women out to work and the men help at home
• Child centred society: A society that focuses on the safety and education of children
• Unit of production: Where the pre-industrial family works together to produce the goods and services needed for it's own survival.
• Cereal packet family: The ideological happy nuclear family
• Family nexus: A family that has close bonds betwen it's members
• Net migration: The difference in the numbers of Emmigation and Immigration
• Emigration: the movement of individuals out of an area
• Immigration: migration into a place (especially migration to a country of which you are not a native in order to settle there)
• Household: a person or group of people living in the same residence and sharing common facilities
• Family: a group of people who are related through kinship ( blood, marriage/civil partnership or adoption). Cohabiting couples are now included in this as it is a popular alternative to marriage.
• Kinship: A social bond based on common ancestry, marriage, or adoption
• Extended family: a family that extends beyond the nuclear family, including grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives, who all live nearby or in one household.
• Reconstituted family: Children from different marriages becoming one family after their divorced parents marry each other