Focusing on the socialization of the human use of other animals as resources in contemporary Western society, this book explores the cultural reproduction of human-nonhuman animal relations in childhood. With close attention to the dominant practices through which children encounter animals and mainstream representations of animals in children's culture - whether in terms of the selective exposure of children to animals as pets or as food in the home or in school, or the representation of animals in mass media and social media - Our Children and Other Animals reveals the interconnectedness of studies of childhood, culture and human-animal relations. In doing so it establishes the importance of human-animal relations in sociology, by describing the sociological importance of animals in children's lives and children in animals' lives. Presenting a new typology of the various kinds of human-animal relationship, this conceptually innovative book constitutes a clear demonstration of the relevance of sociology to the interdisciplinary field of human-animal relations and will appeal to readers across the social sciences with interests in sociology, childhood studies, cultural and media studies and human-animal interaction.

Exam Board: AQA Level & Subject: AS Sociology First teaching: September 2015 Next exams: June 2023 Collins Student Support Materials provide an essential course companion and revision aid. Written by experienced teachers and senior examiners, each book covers the 2015 AQA specification and prepares students for examination success. This title contains all the key information for AQA AS topic 3.2.2.2 Beliefs in Society and AQA A-level topic 4.2.2 Families and Households. Examiners' tips throughout suggest how students can improve their exam performance. Detailed exam guidance, practice questions and sample answers are provided for the following: AS Paper 2, Section B A-level Paper 2, Section A.

This collection brings together some of the most eminent and exciting authors researching family responsibilities to examine understandings of the day to day responsibilities which people undertake within families and the role of the law in the construction of those understandings. The authors explore a range of questions fundamental to our understanding of 'responsibility' in family life: To whom, and to what ends, are family members responsible? Is responsibility primarily a matter of care? Can we fulfil our family responsibilities by paying those to whom we owe responsibility? Or by paying others to fulfil our caring obligations for us? In each of these circumstances the chapters in this collection explore what it means to have family responsibilities, what constitutes an adequate performance of such responsibilities and the point at which the state intervenes. At the heart of this collection is an interest in the way in which the changing family affects people's perception and exercise their family responsibilities, and how the law attempts to regulate (and understand) those responsibilities. The essays range across intact and separated or fragmented families, from lone and shared parenting in single homes to caring across households (and even across international boundaries) to reflect on the actual caring responsibilities of family members and on the fulfilment of financial responsibilities in families. This collection seeks to advance our understanding of the attempts of the law, and its limits, in regulating the responsibilities which family members take for each other.

Family Configurations develops current scholarship on families and intimate lives by demonstrating that family relationships, far from being fluid and inconsequential, are more structured and committed than ever. Based on a series of empirical studies carried out in the US and Europe, this volume reveals the diversity of family relationships that emerge as a result of various key family issues, emphasizing the supportive and disruptive interdependencies existing among large sets of family members beyond the nuclear family. By applying social network methods to uncover the relational patterns of contemporary families, and making use of rich empirical data, this book draws on recent developments in family sociology, social network analysis and kinship studies to present a fascinating interdisciplinary approach to the family.

Testing for genetic diseases or traits is a rapidly developing practice, the most widely used form of testing currently in use being newborn screening. Based on a five-year research project and winner of the Prix 'Le Monde' for academic research in France, The Birth of a Genetics Policy analyses the three dimensions - scientific, political and moral - of the social issues raised by a policy of screening for the genetic disease of cystic fibrosis amongst babies. Drawing on extensive interview material and observational research, it explores the conditions under which a screening policy is decided upon and implemented, the types of political logic underlying it, and the effects it has on norms and values. Revealing the ties that exist between forms of biomedical knowledge and political techniques, whilst showing how the notion of biomedical abnormality is being extended, this book sheds light on judgements surrounding the idea of the 'quality (of) life'. A rigorous examination of the discourses and practices of medical genetics in the early twenty-first century, The Birth of a Genetics Policy will appeal to sociologists and anthropologists with interests in medicine and the body, evidence-based care and questions of biopolitics and governmentality.

Whether glamorised or stigmatised, teenage parenthood is all too often used to stand for a host of social problems, and empirical research results ignored. Identifying core controversies surrounding teen pregnancy and parenting, this book resolves misperceptions using findings from large-scale, longitudinal, and qualitative research studies from the US and other Western countries. Summarising the evidence and integrating it with a systems perspective, the authors explore ten prevalent myths about teenage parents, including: Teen pregnancy is associated with other behavior problems. Children of teen parents will experience cognitive delay, adjustment problems, and will themselves become teen parents. Better outcomes are achieved when teen mothers live with their own mothers. Teen pregnancy costs tax payers lots of money. Abstinence education is the best way to prevent teen pregnancy. Teen Pregnancy and Parenting ends by highlighting the prevention and intervention implications for families, practitioners, and policymakers. It will be of interest to academics and advanced students from a range of disciplines and professions including psychology, public policy, nursing, social work and sociology.

Too many juvenile delinquents persist in their offending into adulthood. They constitute a major burden for individual victims, for businesses and the justice system, all contributing to the total cost of crime for society. Focusing on the transition between juvenile offending and adult crime, this book examines research based on Dutch, European and North-American studies on the persistence and discontinuity of offending between late adolescence and early adulthood. Presenting empirical studies showing why persistence or discontinuity take place, the book provides up-to-date information on preventive and remedial interventions to promote discontinuity of offending amongst young adults. From the same team who produced 'Tomorrow's Criminals', this book will be a valuable resource for criminologists, criminal justice professionals, psychologists, sociologists, and psychiatrists interested in juvenile and young adult offenders, as well as those interested in what makes career criminals and youth who reform.

This book is a detailed examination of parental authority: what justifies and what are the proper limits of a parent's authority over her children? Dennis Arjo focuses on and criticizes attempts to answer these and related questions in the context of liberal philosophy of education. He also offers an alternative framework for thinking about parental authority that draws on recent philosophical work in Virtue Ethics, Care Ethics, and Confucianism that challenges some of the assumptions of contemporary liberal theory. This book will be of interest to philosophers working in ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of education.

With about one half of all marriages ending in divorce today, it is safe to say that nearly everyone will be or has been affected by divorce in some way. For many, it does not mean the end to a family. Focusing on the consequences of divorce for children, The Postdivorce Family examines the stressors that divorce can create; adjustment problems among children of divorce; the issue of resilience for children; and individual differences in the psychological adjustment to divorce. The authors also examine the parents? responsibilities after divorce, including custody issues, child support orders, and nonresidential parenting. This book concludes with a section that explores the effects of a high divorce rate in society, including how the prevalence of divorce has changed the family form and structural factors that have contributed to various social problems. With this volume, the authors hope to incite analysis and reflection of the issues surrounding divorce and their implications for public policy. This book integrates the empirical research and policy perspectives of several scholars in various disciplines including psychology, sociology, human development, law, and social work.

This is the first multidisciplinary text to address the growing scholarly connection between religion and family life. The latest literature from family studies, psychology, sociology, and religion is reviewed along with narratives drawn from interviews with 200 racially, religiously, and regionally diverse families which bring the concepts to life. Written in a thought-provoking, accessible, and sometimes humorous style by two of the leading researchers in the field, the book reflects the authors' firsthand experience in teaching today's students about religion's impact on families. Prior to writing the book, the authors read the sacred texts of many faiths, interviewed religious leaders, and attended religious services for a wide array of faiths. The result is an accurate and engaging account of why and how families are impacted by their religion. The pedagogical features of the text include boldfaced key terms defined in the glossary, text boxes, chapter conclusions, summary points, and review questions. Religion and Families: Examines several denominations within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Reviews findings from racially and ethnically diverse families, from traditional and diverse family forms, and examines gender and life-course issues. Addresses the impact of one's religious involvement on longevity, divorce rates, and parenting styles. Considers demographic, family-, couple-, and individual-level data that relate to prayer and other sacred practices. Presents a balanced treatment of the latest research and a new model for studying family and religion. Explores the "whys," "hows," and processes at work in the religion-family connection. The book opens with a discussion of why religion and family connections matter. Chapter 2 defines religion and presents a new conceptualization of religion. Empirical research connections between religion and marriage, divorce, family, and parent-child relationships are explored in chapters 3 through 6. The interface between religion and the family in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are reviewed in chapters 7, 8, and 9. Chapter 10 explores the unique challenges that religion presents for diverse family forms. Prayer as a coping mechanism for life's challenges such as death and disability are explored in chapter 11. Chapter 12 examines forgiveness in the context of marriages and families. The book concludes with a review of the book's most important themes and findings. Intended as a text for undergraduate courses in family and religion, the psychology or sociology of the family, the psychology or sociology of religion, pastoral/biblical counseling, or family and youth ministry, taught in human development and family studies, psychology, sociology, religion, social work, pastoral counseling, and sometimes philosophy. This book also appeals to family therapists and counselors.

Examining the mimetic theory of Rene Girard, this book investigates the development of society as a result of an original crime (a murder) that shaped the way the earliest humans organized the social structures we live with today - an analysis that reveals the dangerous structure of the most basic social relationships. With attention to family relationships, A Genealogy of Social Violence sheds light on the processes by which the traditional nuclear family, through the mimetic behaviour of children, embeds violence into human desires and hence society as whole. Challenging the thought of Girard and of Rawls in order to offer a new understanding of justice, this book suggests that in order to achieve a more peaceful society, what is required is not the self-defeating narrative of equality, developed in order to manage the violence engendered by our social institutions, but a reconceptualisation of the nuclear family structure. A striking critique of modern society, which draws on religion, mythology, literature, history, philosophy and political theory, A Genealogy of Social Violence will be of interest to social and political theorists, as well as philosophers working in the area of contemporary social and European thought.

How does it feel to live in a 'haunted home'? How do people negotiate their everyday lives with the experience of uncanny, anomalous or strange events within the domestic interior? What do such experiences reveal of the intersection between the material, immaterial and temporal within the home? How do people interpret, share and narrate experiences which are uncertain and unpredictable? What does this reveal about contested beliefs and different forms of knowledge? And about how people 'co-habit' with ghosts, a distinctive self - other relationship within such close quarters? This book sets out to explore these questions. It applies a non-reductive middle-ground approach which steers beyond an uncritical exploration of supernatural experiences without explaining them away by recourse only to wider social and cultural contexts. The book attends to the ways in which households in England and Wales understand their experience of haunting in relation to ideas of subjectivity, gender, materiality, memory, knowledge and belief. It explores home as a place both dynamic and differentiated, illuminating the complexity of 'everyday' experience - the familiarity of the strange as well as the strangeness of the familiar - and the ways in which home continues to be configured as a distinctive space.

Focusing on moral, social and legal responsibilities as opposed to rights or obligations, this volume explores the concept of responsibility in family life, law and practice. Divided into four parts, the study considers the nature of family responsibility; constructions of children's responsibilities; shifting conceptions of family responsibilities; and family, responsibility and the law. The collection brings together leading experts from the disciplines of sociology, socio-legal studies and law to discuss responsibilities prior to birth, responsibilities for children, as well as responsibilities of children and of the state towards family members. The volume informs and challenges the developing conceptualization of responsibilities which arise in interdependent, intimate and caring relationships and their legal regulation. It will be of great interest to researchers and practitioners working in this complex field.

This volume provides a series of critical analyses of some of the contemporary debates in relation to the human rights of children, resituating them within visions which informed the text of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. The studies embrace examination of some of today's widespread interpretations of the CRC, analysis of what is implied by a human rights-based approach in research and advocacy and consideration of advances and barriers to research and to several aspects of CRC implementation. With contributions by leading experts in the field, the book examines the CRC as an international instrument, its inherent dilemmas and some of the debates generated by the challenges of implementation. It embraces examinations of different levels of governance from the international to the state party, regional and local levels, including institutional developments and changes in law, policy and practice. The book will be a valuable resource for students, researchers and policy-makers working in the area of children's rights and welfare.

The past thirty years have seen an explosion of interest in Greek and Roman social history, particularly studies of women and the family. Until recently these studies did not focus especially on children and childhood, but considered children in the larger context of family continuity and inter-family relationships, or legal issues like legitimacy, adoption and inheritance. Recent publications have examined a variety of aspects related to childhood in ancient Greece and Rome, but until now nothing has attempted to comprehensively survey the state of ancient childhood studies. This handbook does just that, showcasing the work of both established and rising scholars and demonstrating the variety of approaches to the study of childhood in the classical world. In thirty chapters, with a detailed introduction and envoi, The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World presents current research in a wide range of topics on ancient childhood, including sub-disciplines of Classics that rarely appear in collections on the family or childhood such as archaeology and ancient medicine. Contributors include some of the foremost experts in the fieldas well as younger, up-and-coming scholars. Unlike most edited volumes on childhood or the family in antiquity, this collection also gives attention to the late antique period and whether (or how) conceptions of childhood and the life of children changed with Christianity. The chronological spread runs from archaic Greece to the later Roman Empire (fifth century C.E.). Geographical areas covered include not only classical Greece and Roman Italy, but also the eastern Mediterranean. The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World engages with perennially valuable questions about family and education in the ancient world while providing a much-needed touchstone for research in the field.

Falling in Love (1889) is a brilliant collection of essays by innovative Canadian writer Grant Allen. His wide-ranging interests and unique, personal tone present science in a style that not only makes difficult concepts digestible to the average reader, but also presages the popularity of New Journalism in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the title essay, Allen moves from analysis of the evolutionary implications of love to a blistering critique of the institution of marriage. Central to this piece is a rejection of matchmaking according to religion, race, and rank, which Allen makes with the hope that "marriage for love...will last for ever." Allen was a writer unafraid of ruffling feathers, a tireless individual who delighted in dissecting and ejecting convention. In "British and Foreign," Allen looks at the non-indigenous nature of so much of Britain's environment to argue that, in the end, "there is nothing really and truly British." Allen was also, perhaps more than anything else, a deeply curious man, a person for whom no topic was unworthy of questioning. In "Honey-Dew," as though under a microscope, he examines the remarkable coexistence between ants and aphids to not only highlight the intricate webs that make up the natural world, but to expose humanity's outsized, and often helpless, role in the life of the planet. Other essays in Falling in Love find Allen espousing on the nonexistence of thunderbolts, composing a treatise on the sociopolitical history of the banana, and saying what he would have said on an archaeological expedition (had he been asked). For Allen, humor is never too far from insight, and insight is always within reach. Falling in Love is both a pleasure to read and intoxicating, a work for readers intrigued by science or looking for a fresh voice to cut through the world's confusion. Grant Allen was not just a novelist and essayist, but a writer's writer whose words read as clearly as though they were written yesterday. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this new edition of Grant Allen's Falling in Love is an understated classic of literary nonfiction reimagined for modern readers.

Extraordinary social and moral shifts have taken place in Western societies. Sex is no longer the exclusive province of husband and wife set within monogamous married family life. The world is awash in sex: advertising, books, magazines, movies, sex clubs, internet pornography, etc. Parents, traditionally responsible for guiding their children's moral and social development, have been effectively side-lined by commercial and governmental interests. This volume pursues a detailed study of how changes in social life dating from the sexual revolution of the 1960s have affected the family. Cherry shows that attempts to redefine the family away from the marital union of husband and wife come with real costs: social, emotional, psychological, and financial. He argues that while political campaigns have fuelled attempts to undermine the traditional family, to pretend it possesses no basic biological, social, or moral reality, such ideologically driven undertakings are injurious to society. Acting as if there are no consequential differences between traditional marriage and other sexual lifestyles ignores significant data demonstrating the importance of the traditional biological family to the well-being of men and women, and the successful raising of children. The family possesses a biological and moral being that is foundational; an essential building block of society. Cherry argues that the family is the most incontrovertible field of conflict in the culture wars; others might conclude that it is the decisive battleground.

In Getting Married, Carrie Yodanis and Sean Lauer examine the social rules and expectations that shape our most personal relationships. How do couples get together? How do people act when they're married? What happens when they're not? Public factors influence our private relationships. From getting engaged to breaking up, social rules and expectations shape and constrain whom we select as a spouse, when and why we decide to get married, and how we arrange our relationships day to day. While this book is about marriage, it is also about sociology. Yodanis and Lauer use the case of marriage to explore a sociological perspective. Getting Married will bring together students' academic and social worlds by applying sociology to the things they are thinking about and experiencing outside of the classroom. This book is a useful tool for many sociology courses, including those on family, gender, and introduction to sociology.

How do marriages become unhappy? How do marriages change? What are the theories and methods that can best illuminate our understanding of marital development? This 1998 volume comprehensively explores how marriages develop and deteriorate, and in doing so, brings together leading scholars to present research on the longitudinal course of marriage. The chapters share a common focus on the early phases of marriage but address a diverse array of topics, including marital conflict, personality, social support, the transition to parenthood, violence, ethnicity, stress, alcohol use, commitment and sexuality. Implications of this research for alleviating marital distress are also noted. The book concludes with six provocative analyses by prominent scholars in the areas of sociology, clinical psychology, social psychology and developmental psychology.

From a comparative perspective, human life histories are unique and raising offspring is unusually costly: humans have relatively short birth intervals compared to other apes, childhood is long, mothers care simultaneously for many dependent children (other apes raise one offspring at a time), infant mortality is high in natural fertility/mortality populations, and human females have a long post-reproductive lifespan. These features conspire to make child raising very burdensome. Mothers frequently defray these costs with paternal help (not usual in other ape species), although this contribution is not always enough. Grandmothers, elder siblings, paid allocarers, or society as a whole, help to defray the costs of childcare, both in our evolutionary past and now. Studying offspring care in a various human societies, and other mammalian species, a wide range of specialists such as anthropologists, psychologists, animal behaviorists, evolutionary ecologists, economists and sociologists, have contributed to this volume, offering new insights into and a better understanding of one of the key areas of human society.

Do you ever feel that someone's gestures are telling you something different than the words they are saying? Has a cashier asked you how you are without glancing up from the items he or she is scanning? Have you ever felt that the firmness of your words is undermined by your feeble body language? Although spoken and written language may seem like our primary methods of communicating with one another, body language plays a strikingly prominent role, making up more than 90 percent of communication.

In the first English translation of Philippe Turchet's "The Secrets of Body Language," readers can discover all the ways they have been inadvertently communicating negative, positive, neutral, or mixed messages with the simple body movements they habitually make without even thinking about it. Turchet makes us aware of the true importance of body language in all contexts, relationships, and encounters, and explains how body language embedded in our genetic makeup has the remarkable ability to transcend the language barriers and communicate universal meaning. In this enlightening book, find out what your own body language is telling other people, how you can read the signs of others' bodies, and how to most effectively utilize your own body movements to "say" what you really mean.

Historically, children were often understood in relation to their development towards adulthood, but the 'new paradigm' of childhood studies has since shown how they should be taken more seriously as active participants in their own lives. Studying childhood is not just a question of research on children, but increasingly a practice of research with them. With this 'new paradigm' having now come of age, Sally McNamee offers a comprehensive overview of the current state of childhood studies and its history. Taking a thematic approach, she looks at how issues such as rights and citizenship, the state, the family, school, work, leisure, health and globalisation shape and are shaped by children. The Social Study of Childhood is an accessible introduction for students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds such as childhood studies, sociology, psychology, social work and education. With reflection points for discussion and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, it is an engaging and stimulating account of how and why children's voices deserve to be heard in today's world.

First published in 1988, behavioural family therapists worked in an area that had greatly changed since its inception over 20 years before. Growing out of the pioneering work of Gerald Patterson, Robert Paul Liberman, and Richard Stuart, whose backgrounds vary from psychology to psychiatry to social work, behavioural family therapy (BFT) had evolved to encompass systems theory, considerations of the therapeutic alliance, as well as approaches to accounting for and restructuring family members' subjective experiences through cognitive strategies. As BFT had not been the 'brain child' of any one charismatic innovator, but rather of a wide array of clinicians and researchers developing and rigorously testing hypotheses, it is fitting that this much-needed summation of the field was a collaborative product of an array of well-established practitioners of the time. They discuss in Part 1 of the book the theoretical parameters of BFT, focusing on modular behavioural strategies, the indications for therapy, assessment of family problems, pertinent issues arising in clinical practice, and approaches to the problem of resistance to change. Contributors to Part 2 then apply theory to such clinical situations as 'parent training' and helping families cope with patients suffering from developmental disabilities, alcoholism, schizophrenia, senile dementia, as well as anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, and depressive disorders. Specific attention is also given to acute inpatient and primary health-care settings. While BFT had already proved quite effective in treating a great number of family problems, it was only in its infancy at the time of writing. As Falloon says in his overview 'all exponents of the method are constantly involved with the process of refinement, each clinician is a researcher, each family member is a research subject, and each researcher is contributing to clinical advancement.' This openness, in combination with a willingness to modify 'sacred' tenets of behaviourism while adapting proven techniques from other family therapies, made this title a landmark in its field. As such, it was not only of interest to all clinicians and researchers with a behavioural slant, but also to all family therapists who wished to challenge themselves to develop an integrative approach.

This book offers a social movement perspective on family violence, framing the discovery of abuse toward women and men as a natural development flowing out of social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It combines clinical and statistical methods to yield a sophisticated understanding of the dynamics underlying spousal violence. It examines both men's violence and the violence of their female partners, both psychological as well as physical. The problem of women's violence is one that has remained largely ignored compared to the mountain of research on men's violence toward women. The authors present the first in-depth examination of how, when, and why women instigate violence and why violent couples require a systems-level intervention program rather than simply trying to counter male violence. There is a strong consideration of factors that can work to reduce or eliminate the problem.

In Getting Married, Carrie Yodanis and Sean Lauer examine the social rules and expectations that shape our most personal relationships. How do couples get together? How do people act when they're married? What happens when they're not? Public factors influence our private relationships. From getting engaged to breaking up, social rules and expectations shape and constrain whom we select as a spouse, when and why we decide to get married, and how we arrange our relationships day to day. While this book is about marriage, it is also about sociology. Yodanis and Lauer use the case of marriage to explore a sociological perspective. Getting Married will bring together students' academic and social worlds by applying sociology to the things they are thinking about and experiencing outside of the classroom. This book is a useful tool for many sociology courses, including those on family, gender, and introduction to sociology.