Against the background of the problems involved in the comparative study of human society, the essays in this book show the comparative ideal in practice, which combines elements from both sociology and anthropology. In each essay, specific problems are treated in a way which tests theory against evidence, to replace assertion by demonstration. Topics covered include: * Incest and Adultery * Double descent systems * Inheritance, social change and the boundary problem * Marriage policy * The circulation of women and children in northern Ghana * Indo-European kinship. First published in 1969.

Constituting a measured but devastating critique of Levi-Strauss's work on kinship systems, this book deals with prescriptive forms of social classification and had far-reaching implications for anthropological theory when it was originally published. Originally published in 1973.

The chapters in this volume were developed as a follow-up to the Summer Institute entitled "Continuity and Change: Family Structure and Process" conducted by the second Family Research Consortium. The goal of this book is to provide readers with a greater understanding of both the conceptual issues involved in the study of continuity and change in families, and also some of the methodological approaches that have been developed for investigating families over time.

With a focus on nine different national contexts, this book explores contemporary family diversity. With attention to the different welfare states and cultures of care in each setting, it problematises the pre-eminence of research and policy centred on heteronormative families, showing the extent to which family diversity exists cross-nationally in relation to different gendered and "family-friendly" policies. Considering variations in family forms, including differences in the number and marital status of parents, their gender, sexual orientation and biological relationship to the children (adoption), multi-cultural families, and families created by technological assistance or surrogacy, it presents demographic information, alongside quantitative and qualitative research, across a number of advanced countries. A contribution to our understanding of the diversity of family forms, how diversity is lived in families, and what family diversity means in various international policy contexts The Changing Faces of Families will appeal to scholars with interests in the sociology of the family.

This volume is concerned with two of the fundamental topics of social anthropology, kinship and marriage, approached from a variety of viewpoints by an international group of contributors of diverse experience and background. The wide range of subjects examined includes: Incest, epistemology, linguistics, prescriptive alliance and methodology. Fieldwork from the following countries is drawn on: Burma, Sri Lanka, New Guinea, Australia, Africa and South America.

Any parent who has raised more than one child is likely to be keenly aware of subtle or even striking differences among their offspring. The central premise of this volume is that children bring personal qualities to their relationships with other family members that help shape family interaction, relationships, and even processes that family researchers have called "parenting." The chapters address how children's personal qualities make their mark on families in ways that may in turn influence children's subsequent development.
The volume is based on the presentations and discussions from a national symposium on "Children's influence on family dynamics: The neglected side of family relationships" held at the Pennsylvania State University, as the ninth in a series of annual interdisciplinary symposia focused on family issues. It is divided into four parts, each dealing with a different aspect of the topic. Part I sets the stage by focusing on the features of children that make a difference, as well as the kinds of research designs that are likely to shed light on the role of child influences. Part II focuses on early childhood, particularly the role of infant temperament and other individual differences in very young children in shaping their parents' behaviors, reactions in turn that feedback and influence the developing child. Part III focuses on adolescence, a time when young people are able to exert more choice in how they spend their time and who they spend it with. Part IV pulls the themes of the volume together and points the way for future research.

Originally published in 1966, this is a sociological study of boys growing up in East London. Previous books from the Institute of Community Studies had looked at the lives of other residents of Bethnal Green - couples with young children, middle-aged 'Mums', old people, widows. Now the subject is adolescent boys - a study of them not in isolation nor primarily as a 'problem' group but as young people moving between childhood and adulthood in the setting of a particular local community. What is it like to grow up in a district like Bethnal Green? How do the boys adjust to the process? What part is played by school, work, youth club, family? What are the boys' relationships with their fellows and with girls? Where does delinquency fit in? To help answer such questions, a sample of 246 boys aged 14 to 20 were interviewed. The statistical analysis of this survey has been supplemented by illustrative material from diaries, tape-recorded interviews, and informal observation. The outcome is a vivid account, much of it in the boys' own words, which was rather different from some popular views of contemporary adolescence at the time. Today it can be read and enjoyed in its historical context.

This volume offers rare insight into an enduring case of anorexia nervosa in a female patient, and details the approaches to treatment taken by psychotherapists throughout the sixty-year period from 1938 to 2002. Through discussion and analysis of clinical notes and transcripts, Lipsitt traces the course of the patient's illness to consider the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship, and to highlight aspects of constancy and change in the illness over time. Particular attention is paid to shifts and progress in understanding and treatment of anorexia nervosa, and consideration is also given to how contemporary treatment might differ in view of more recent advances in cognitive behavioral approaches. Offering an innovative approach towards addressing the transgenerational perspective of women's eating disorder experiences, this book provides material for a range of professionals to discuss the nature of the disorder and the pros and cons of different treatment approaches. An original take on the relationship dynamics and perspectives of anorexia sufferers, this volume will be of interest to students, faculty, and scholars with an interest in studying eating disorders and psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Adoption: Changing Families, Changing Times draws together contributions from all those with an interest in adoption: adopted people; birth parents and adoptive parents; practitioners and managers in the statutory and voluntary sectors; academics and policy makers. Chapters on research and policy are interspersed with those from people with first-hand experience of being adopted, becoming an adoptive parent or giving a child up for adoption. Together, they provide unique insights into a subject that although regularly in the media is often surrounded by prejudice and misconception. Topics covered include:
* children and young people in care
* trying to adopt
* waiting for adoption
* life after adoption
* the politics of adoption.
This accessible text offers a comprehensive view of adoption policy, practice and services and analyses why adoption has become so controversial. It provides professional and general reader alike with a fully rounded picture of adoption and exposes some of the myths surrounding it.

They must make mature decisions before they are out of school, take on adult responsibilities before they have left home, and care for their children before they have completed their own childhood. One of today's greatest social issues, pregnant teens walk the boundary between childhood and adulthood, no longer able to reside in one world, and unprepared for the next. While society traditionally is quick to condemn, Wendy Luttrell counters the stigmatising ways in which such girls have been traditionally held with this moving ethnography of their lives. Focusing on fifty girls enrolled in a model public school program for pregnant teens in the US, Luttrell explores how pregnant girls experience society's view of them and also considers how these girls view themselves and the choices they've made. She pays particular attention to how schools react to pregnant teens and what they are doing to help these vulnerable young women to achieve their education. Readers learn the real problems that pregnant teens are dealing with, and how society's racial and class stereotypes continue to stigmatise and scapegoat them. These individual stories are accompanied by personal self-portraits that present a carefully detailed and powerfully moving picture of the issues these girls face everyday.

Bringing together a range of perspectives, this book establishes a criminology of the domestic, paying particular attention to emerging spatial and relational reconfigurations. We move beyond criminologies of public and urban domains to consider over-looked non-public locales, and crimes and harms that occur in the home and other private spaces. Developed in the context of the COVID-19 lockdowns, where distinctions between public and private became increasingly untenable, the book considers how the pandemic has accelerated new patterns of behaviour, enabled by technology and shifting social relations. Drawing on a range of criminological topics, including victimisation, offending, property and violent crime, consumption, deviance and leisure, and zemiology, the book argues that the domestic sphere, and its relation to the public realm, needs to be more carefully conceptualised if criminology is to respond to new spatial and relational dimensions of changing lifestyles. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, politics, geography, history, gender, surveillance and security and all those interested in a criminology of the domestic sphere.

Explore the reasons that new families break up This landmark book examines the causes and consequences of divorce occurring during pregnancy or within a year of childbirth. Women's Stories of Divorce at Childbirth: When the Baby Rocks the Cradle draws from the experiences of seventeen women who suffered this especially traumatic form of family breakup. Using ideas gleaned from psychoanalytic theory, academic psychology, attachment theory, sociology, trauma studies, and infant development research, Dr. Hoge examines the personal, familial, and social significance of these stories of personal betrayal and heartbreak. The women's narratives show in stark detail how the transition to parenthood can become a personal crisis for some new fathers and mothers, one that may prompt them to run away, search out extramarital affairs, or lapse into addictions. Women's Stories of Divorce at Childbirth also explores the short- and long-term effects of the resulting trauma, grief, and anger felt by the spouse left holding the baby. Because the women's stories are discussed throughout the book, they become more than random cases chosen to illustrate a single point. Women's Stories of Divorce at Childbirth discusses the important issues of early divorce, including: parenthood as transition and transformation emotional ramifications of extreme-condition divorces economic consequences of divorce at childbirth the lasting emotional reactions of infants and children Women's Stories of Divorce at Childbirth is a powerful, insightful examination of a potentially devastating problem. This well-written book will become a uniquely valuable resource to counselors and mental health professionals, couples having difficulty with the transition to parenthood, new parents who are considering divorce, and survivors of divorce at childbirth.

Based on the presentations and discussions from a national symposia, "Just Living Together" represents one of the first systematic efforts to focus on cohabitation. The book is divided into four parts, each dealing with a different aspect of cohabitation. Part I addresses the big picture question, "What are the historical and cross cultural foundations of cohabitation?" Part II focuses specifically on North America and asks, "What is the role of cohabitation in contemporary North American family structure?" Part III turns the focus to the question, "What is the long- and short-term impact of cohabitation on child well-being?" Part IV addresses how cohabiting couples are affected by current policies and what policy innovations could be introduced to support these couples.
Providing a road map for future research, program development, and policymaking. "Just Living Together" will serve as an important resource for people interested in learning about variations in the ways families of today are choosing to organize themselves.

During the second half of the Twentieth Century the U.S. experienced a profound demographic transformation. Immigration has become one of the most significant influences on American society. This set will explore the major features of the new immigration, bringing together the major scholarly contributions published in the last decade. and will focus on Latin American, Caribbean and Asian Immigration.

Describes and analyses the corollaries of declining fertility in Southern India to discover how familial and gender relations are affected by the new situation of women giving birth only to 2-3 children.

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences. This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press. Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1957 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

Few Americans escape the experience of divorce, either first-hand or through the dissolutions of marriages of friends or relatives. According to the author, mediation offers a good alternative to the strictly adversarial divorce process that was so prevalent before such programs began to emerge. Originally published in 1991, this book was unique at the time in that it not only explores the role of communication in divorce mediation, but it also presents original research to support its claims. A series of empirical studies, it points readers to a more focused set of recommendations about communication than the typical practitioner's "How-to" books. A simulation exercise is also included, so that readers can apply the concepts described and see the results. The main goal of this text is to provide mediators with a language for understanding their own and their disputants' communication patterns, strategies, and tactics - a shortcoming of most other books on this topic when first published.

Originally published in 1988, the author of the classic Family and Marriage in Britain (1962), Professor Ronald Fletcher here makes a new appraisal of the family in society today. Comprehensive in its range of material and straightforward in style, the book represents his thoughts on the family and marriage in Britain in the 1980s. Since the 1969 Divorce Reform Act, many anxieties had been felt and voiced about the trends of divorce, marital breakdown, the growing instability of the family and so on. The changes, however, were hard to discern and assess, statistical records difficult to interpret reliably. Ronald Fletcher discusses these continuing anxieties and presents a thorough-going critical review of these changes and statistics. In his conclusions he emphasises the continuing importance in modern society of the family and marriage. Professor Fletcher examines the family as both an agent and symptom of change. He explores in detail the relation between family life and the deeper long-term changes which had been at work throughout the twentieth century - the disrupting experience of world wars; the rapidity of technological and social change; the many-sided changes in communications; the spread of secularisation; and changes in education - seeking a profound and satisfactory causal explanation. He ends with a consideration of the future of the family and society alike, and what our social and educational policies ought to be if certain values and qualities of life are to be sustained. The Shaking of the Foundations is the companion volume to The Abolitionists (1989), in which Ronald Fletcher critically examines the anti-family arguments of the previous thirty years.

Family foster care is supposed to provide temporary protection and nurturing for children experiencing maltreatment. Although it has long been a critical service for millions of children in the United States, the increased attention given to this service in the last two decades has focused more on its inability to achieve its intended outcomes than on its successes. However, as social and political trends and new legislation reshape child welfare, policymakers and service providers continue to offer innovative policy and practice options for this child welfare service. Though use of the service has changed, family foster care remains important.
Responding to a widespread sense of the "drifting" of children in care, Congress passed the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980. This legislation became a key factor shaping the current status of family foster care. Its goal was to reduce reliance on out-of-home care and encourage use of preventive and reunification services; it also mandated that agencies engage in planning efforts for permanent solutions for foster children. Yet, despite federal mandates and funding, the child welfare system has continued to struggle to provide the level of services needed for children to reduce the amount of time children remain in temporary foster care. The latest response to these problems, the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, established unequivocally that safety, permanency, and well-being were national goals for children in the child welfare system. To comply with the law, public and private agencies are required to initiate significant program and practice changes in the coming years to improve permanency outcomes and child well-being in family foster care.
The central theme of the volume is accountability for outcomes, certainly a current driving force in child welfare as well as in other public and private service fields. This volume will be of interest to all concerned with the social welfare of children and families at the end of the twentieth century.
Kathy Barbell is director of Foster Care of the Child Welfare League of America, Washington, DC.
Lois Wright is assistant dean at the College of Social Work, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences. This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press. Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1957 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

In this book the authors examine in depth the lives of inner-city adolescent mothers, going beyond stereotypes to illuminate the diverse pathways to young adulthood taken by these young women. The different ways they respond to becoming a parent reflect a range of abilities, aspirations, and supports. Their often-creative solutions to living in poverty, the intensity of their desires to make their children's lives better, the height of their youthful ambition when they succeed, and the depth of their pain when they fail, all show a surprising range. The authors argue that adolescent mothers who enter young adulthood with the skills and desires to care for themselves and their children are "not" the resilient few and present a lengthy analysis of the multidimensional processes that lead to and characterize this resilience.
In making constructive suggestions for social welfare policies and reforms, this book serves as an ideal model of the important uses of qualitative research for understanding the adolescent experience. More than that, the book stands out among others by this social policy perspective and its focus on encouraging adolescent mothers to reach their potentials.
This volume aims to attract those who wish to learn more about the adolescent experience without getting lost in the detail of the methods and analyses. To this end, the main body of the text presents general methods and results. Scholarly details of the work are placed in appendices to which the interested reader can refer. A second highlight is the inclusion of impressionistic material, such as quotes from the adolescent mothers who were participants in this research. Such material brings to life the real issues of very real adolescents--their triumphs and struggles, their riches and poverty, their strengths and weaknesses.

Use your family therapy skills to coordinate multidisciplinary teams This comprehensive book examines family therapy issues in the context of the larger systems of health, law, and education. Family Systems/Family Therapy shows how family therapists can bring their skills to bear on a broad range of problems, both by considering the effects of larger social systems and by cooperating with professionals in other disciplines. Because family therapists are trained to understand how systems operate, they can offer wise guidance whether the dysfunction is occurring within the family system or between the individual and the larger systems of society. The studies and projects reported in Family Systems/Family Therapy demonstrate the ways in which family therapists can help create dialogues of inclusion to develop innovative, effective solution plans. The PEACE project, for example, brings together judges, attorneys, divorcing parents, and therapists to help children deal with the strains of divorce. Family Systems/Family Therapy includes both practical case histories and theoretical considerations. This thought-provoking book suggests areas in which an intersystems approach can be especially effective, including: preventing substance abuse in adolescent girls enhancing awareness of adolescent dating violence managing geriatric care, not just for the identified patient, but for the family as a whole doing court-ordered therapy for divorcing couples working with children labeled as difficult and their teachersFamily Systems/Family Therapy will give family therapists a new vision of what they can achieve when working in the context of individuals, families, or the broader system.

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences. This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press. Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1957 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

There is a mysterious connection between our experiences of intimacy--of love, the longing to feel connected, and sexual embrace--and the human sense of time--eternity, impermanence, and rhythm. In this critical analysis of the time-intimacy equation, Bennett shows how the scientific study of personal relationships can address this mystery. As a study of transpersonal science, this book points to the possible evolution of intimacy and of our consciousness of time, and how the two evolutionary paths weave together.
Dr. Bennett draws from a wide array of resources to advance and marry two compelling themes: first, the social and clinical science of personal relationships should integrate the spiritual or transpersonal dimension of intimacy, and second, science can contribute to lay understandings by describing the richly temporal aspects of relationships. In blending popular literature, transpersonal psychology, and scientific research and theory, this work also attempts to address the lack of dialogue between academics who study personal intimacy and those writers in the popular press who give advice and guidelines for building intimacy.
"Time and Intimacy" is written for a broad audience, intended for those with a general interest in relationships, as well as for students, counselors, and psychologists. It can be used as a text in courses on personal relationships, as well as to supplement courses in humanistic psychology, transpersonal psychology, interpersonal communication, relationships, marital and family counseling, human relations, and related areas. Because it advances an interdisciplinary understanding of personal relationships, this book is certain to challenge prevailing views about the meaning of intimacy in both the academic and popular literatures.

This volume focuses entirely on children and material culture. The contributors ask: what is the relationship between children and the material world?; is the material culture of children the same across all times and cultures, or does it vary?; and how can we access the actions and identities of children in the material records? The collection spans a period from the Palaeolithic to the late-20th century, and uses data from across Europe, Scandinavia, the Americas and Asia. The international contributors are from a range of disciplines including archaeology, cultural and biological anthropology, psychology and museum studies. All integrate theory and data to illustrate the significance and potential of studying children.