personal life perspective

• Personal life perspective on families

  Argues that functionalist, Marxist and feminist theories suffer from two weaknesses: 1) They tend to assume the traditional nuclear family is dominant, ignoring family diversity today. 2) They are all structural theories that view families and members as passive puppets manipulated by society
• Sociology of personal life

  • Strongly influenced by interactionist ideas
  • Emphasises the meanings that individual family members hold and how these shape their actions and relationships
  • Takes a 'bottom up' approach in contrast to the 'top down' structural approaches of other theories
• Relationships beyond traditional family

  • Relationships with friends who may be like a 'sister' or 'brother'
  • Fictive kin: close friends treated as relatives
  • Gay and lesbian 'chosen families' made up of supportive network
  • Relationships with dead relatives
  • Relationships with pets
• Donor-conceived children


  Raises questions about what counts as family when a child shares a genetic link with a relative stranger but not their partner
• It is questionable how legitimate it is to count pets, friends and dead relatives as part of your family
• Mum


  Defined by the time and effort put into raising the child, not the cell that starts it off
• Non-genetic parent


  Difficult feelings could flare up if somebody remarked that the child looked like them
• Differences in appearance

  Led parents to wonder about the donor's identity and about possible 'donor siblings' and whether these counted as family for their child
• Where couples knew their donor

  1. They had to resolve questions about who counted as family

  2. Do the donor's parents count as grandparents of a donor-conceived child?

  3. Is the donor-conceived child a sibling to the donor's other children?
• For lesbian couples

  There were concerns about equality between the genetic and non-genetic mothers and that the donor might be treated as the real second parent
• The personal life perspective helps us to understand how people themselves construct and define their relationships as family, rather than imposing traditional sociological definitions of the family based on blood or genes, for example, from the outside
• The personal life perspective can be accused of taking too broad a view by including a wide range of different kinds of personal relationships, ignoring what is special about relationships that are based on blood or marriage
• The personal life perspective rejects the top down view taken by other perspectives, such as functionalism
• The personal life perspective recognises that relatedness is not always positive, for example, people may be trapped in violent abuse relationships or simply in ones where they suffer unhappiness, hurt or lack of respect
• Functionalists take a consensus view of the family, seeing it as a universal institution that performs essential functions for society as a whole and for all its members
• Parsons sees a functional fit between the nuclear family and modern society's need for a mobile labour force
• Marxists see the family as serving the economic and ideological needs of capitalism, such as the transmission of private property from one generation of capitalists to the next
• Feminists see the family as perpetuating patriarchy
• Functionalist, Marxist and feminist theories have all been criticised for neglecting family diversity and individuals' capacity to choose their family arrangements