2.2 How and Why We Study Families
Elizabeth B. Pearce
Families and kinship are of great interest to most, if not all, people. We all have a family, whether or not that family meets the socially constructed definition of family that is common in the United States or our own definition of family.
Objective and Subjective Views
Sociologist Paul Amato separates family into objective and subjective definitions (Amato, 2019). The objective definitions are often provided by governmental structures. Employers, schools, and agencies also rely on these definitions. Subjective definitions are both richer in context and more complicated to explain. This includes your own definition of family. When we are discussing equity and families, we must attend to the subjective definitions. Because it is only by measuring the experiences of all families in the United States that we can really perceive how privilege, power, and discrimination affect families.
Using Your Sociological Imagination
We study families in order to better understand ourselves. When we can see our own family within the greater context of the experiences of other families and societal influences and trends, we understand ourselves better. Being able to relate your own experiences to these greater forces and interactions with the world is called the sociological imagination.
Sociologist Charles Wright Mills created this term in 1959 in order to help explain the ways that the field of sociology contributes to both everyday life and academia (Wright Mills, 1959). Throughout this course and this text you will be given opportunities to develop your sociological imagination. Ask yourself how your own family’s experiences relate to the broad trends and events in this country. Where do you fit? Or do you find yourself an outlier, differing from other members of your family, social group, or society?
Learning about Others
We also study families in order to better understand other families and society. In this way we recognize both the uniqueness of each family and the ways in which groups share identities and experiences. Let’s say that you feel familiar with the experience of a rural student family, because you are a student and you live in a rural community. You may be able to speak very eloquently to the challenges students are facing today and what living in a rural setting means about your access to education, medical care, healthy food, and transportation. At the same time, you cannot speak for all rural student families, because every family has a unique history and set of circumstances that affects their lives. So part of your job in studying families is to listen and understand how those other rural student families experience life.
Simultaneously we study families to understand the circumstances and experiences of families that we have never met. It’s even more important to listen to and understand families we might see as different from us. You might easily see the differences between a family