PLP

• Top Down Perspective

  •Also known as a macro orpositivist perspective•Gives an overall view of society,as if looking down from above•From the top-down perspective, you can understand:–How many people there areWhat people are doing
• Bottom Up Perspective

  •Also known as a micro or aninterpretivist perspective•Gives a detailed view on ‘pockets’ of society, as if being on the ground•From the bottom-up perspective, you can understand:–Why people do things (social meaning)–How people do these things
• PLP

  interactionist theory – an approach which believes that meaning is produced through the interactions of individuals
• The personal life perspective argues that all of the previous perspectives share two weaknesses

  –They tend to assume that the traditional nuclear family is the dominant family type, ignoring diverse family types such as lone parent families and reconstituted (step) families).

  –They are all structural theories – they assume that families and their members are passive puppets manipulated by society to perform certain functions. They ignore the choices we have in shaping our own relationships.
• 1.Fictive kin – close friends you treat as family e.g. auntie
• Eval

  Strengths

  •It helps us to understand how people define their relationships for themselves, without imposing traditional definitions on them.•They acknowledge that relationships can be both positive and negative: either supportive or abusive.
• Eval

  Weaknesses

  •Takes too broad a view. By including so many types of relationships, some argue they ignore what is special about the blood and marriage relationships.