How does structural functionalism relate to family

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Social studies. Ben Davis November 17, How does family perpetuate social inequality? How does structural functionalism relate to family? How does functionalist theory explain social inequality? How does family reinforce inequality? How important is family in society? What are the responsibilities of the other member of your family at home? How do you compare your role in the family and in the community?

What is the relation between family and community? What is your role in community? What is your role in the community as a student? Why is it important for the youth to be involved in community action? What can youth do to help the community? How can youth change the society? Can the youth make a difference? How do you influence the youth? Sexual function refers to the regulation of sexual activity.

When considering the role of family in society, functionalists uphold the notion that families are an important social institution and that they play a key role in stabilizing society. They also note that family members take on status roles in a marriage or family. There are four functions of family. These four functions include regulation of sexual activity, socialization, reproduction, and economic and emotional security. According to conflict theorists, the family works toward the continuance of social inequality within a society by maintaining and reinforcing the status quo.

Conflict theorists have also seen the family as a social arrangement benefiting men more than women, allowing men to maintain a position of power. The functionalist perspective sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability. This approach looks at society through a macro-level orientation and broadly focuses on the social structures that shape society as a whole.

Functionalism or structural functionalism is the perspective in sociology according to which society consists of different but related parts, each of which serves a particular purpose. Problems in a single part of society can disrupt the whole.

It benefits the powerful at the expense of the working class and women. The Marxist-feminist Benston argues that the nuclear family provides the basic commodity required by capitalism, i. Symbolic interactionism is a school of thought in sociology that explains social behavior in terms of how people interact with each other via symbols; in this view, social structures are best understood in terms of such individual interactions.

Mead believed that one's self develops through social interactions. According to the functionalist perspective of sociology, each aspect of society is interdependent and contributes to society's stability and functioning as a whole. For example , the government provides education for the children of the family, which in turn pays taxes on which the state depends to keep itself running. Biological Functions : Marriage regulates and socially validates sexual relations between males and females.

It is the means to satisfy sexual desire of human beings for reproductive process. So the institution of marriage fulfils the biological function of human beings.

In most societies, the family is the major unit in which socialization happens. However, when women and men in the s and s began in earnest to make choices about sexuality, abortion, labor force participation, children, marriage, divorce, cohabitation, homosexuality, and so on, that ran counter to the prescribed norms above, SF found itself in a entirely untenable position.

Because SF had no theoretical insights explaining how persons could create or invent new norms via creative problem solving, SF was left with nothing to do but to mark the behaviors of growing numbers of people as "deviant.

After SF got its decent burial, researchers in the s turned their attention to the new and innovative ways women and men were creating relationships and families Sussman ; Sussman and Cogswell ; Macklin and Rubin ; Scanzoni , b. And for awhile, it looked as though SF might remain extinct. The old SF question, "How do we get people to conform to prescribed values and norms? But, strangely enough, a funny thing happened in pursuit of their new question.

The counterrevolution that Margaret Mead predicted came to pass. In the United States, religious, social, and political conservatives joined forces in the s and s for the purpose, first of all, of successfully derailing the Equal Rights Amendment ERA. The basis for their success was functionalist to the core—the ERA, they charged, would result in innumerable social pathologies. Quite apart from the ERA, the New Right highlighted sharply increasing divorce rates and alleged widespread sexual promiscuity as evidence that the changes begun in the "corrosive 60s," combined with what they saw as the "narcissism" of the s, were taking a heavy toll on the "standard family" Scanzoni , However, in Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe, no counter-revolution has occurred.

Owing perhaps to the absence of the U. European researchers continued to examine the ways in which persons were creating innovative ways of doing families Gravenhorst ; Horelli and Vespa ; Scanzoni At the same time s and s , U.

They were warned in ominous terms that heterosexual cohabitation, for example, was associated with marital instability. Even gloomier was the assertion that children from one-parent families, and children with employed mothers, might be liable to innumerable defects of one sort or another.

Those alleged conclusions, alongside other kinds of allegations, fed on each other so that now that style of work—the dysfunctions of deviance—has almost entirely trumped research questions about innovation. Parsons' ghost lives in our midst. Many researchers today are, inadvertently to be sure and without calling it SF, utilizing a functionalist agenda.

For all too brief a period, the most exciting research question in the field was "How are people or groups— within a milieu that either enables or constrains them —able or not to bring about changes in families" Giddens ?

Now, however, efforts to explore the ways in which families might continue to evolve away from the uniformity of the post—World War II isolated nuclear style toward arrangements characterized by diversity variety of arrangements within the household alongside external household connectedness are in the distinct minority Scanzoni , a, in press. Although contemporary researchers throughout the world seldom use Parsons' terminology, they are nonetheless quite busy documenting the dysfunctions of deviance from appropriate norms.

Some researchers, like David Popenoe , are more radical in their agenda. He seems intent on overtly restoring SF to the pinnacle of theories about families. Unlike most other writers, his essay makes generous use of functionalist jargon and is almost totally governed by SF logic.

To be sure, he manages a few slight concessions to the changes of recent decades. For example, although he proposes a neo -standard family, it is in almost every important aspect merely a rehashing of Parsons' standard family Scanzoni b.

Popenoe simply disregards the prevailing theories in social science today, most of which consider human agency to be a vital element in explaining social reality Scanzoni and Marsiglio Instead, he tends to reify his neo-standard family and, like Parsons, to argue that deviation from culturally appropriate values and norms spawns social pathology.

Although Popenoe is unlikely to succeed in his quest at overt SF restoration, he and many others are responsible for reinvigorating SF's latest influence. But the question remains—why have SF-type research issues gotten so popular? In the s, SF critics charged that it was imbued with a conservative social, economic, and political ideology Merton The critics said there was a natural affinity between conservative public policy aimed maintaining the status quo, and a social theory that could not explain social change.

The affinity between SF and conservative ideology was made even more apparent, said the critics, when SF labeled change as deviance and viewed it as a catalyst for social pathology. Today, religious, social, and political conservatives have joined forces not simply to maintain the status quo when it comes to families.

Instead, they want to turn back the clock to an earlier time when there were no viable alternatives to the standard family Council on Families in America Popenoe, although he does not explicitly endorse the idea of going back, comes awfully close by saying that his reader would probably agree with the statement that, "In many ways, 'things are not as good as they were when I was growing up'" Popenoe , p.

Idealizing the past is a core conservative theme, and the question is—although it cannot be answered here—does conservative ideology describe a certain proportion of those who teach, study, and write about families? And does that same ideology characterize a ratio of those who make policy recommendations for families?

Presuming there is an affinity between conservative ideology and SF offers one possible explanation for the remarkable tenacity of SF in the field of studies about families. Moreover, such an affinity illustrates once again that the scholar's own beliefs and values play a major role in influencing the scientific research questions she or he asks. Order and innovation exist, obviously, on a continuum.

Conservatives are found to its center and right, believing that individual and social wellbeing are enhanced by a blend of order and innovation that favors that former. Scholars who believe in that formula would feel quite at home with SF even though they never use its jargon. On the other hand, scholars to the center and left of the continuum who believe that individual and social well-being are advanced by a formula favoring innovation over order do not feel the least bit comfortable with SF.

They are instead much more at home with theories about families in which human agency plays a pivotal role. The degree to which—if at all—that situation might change in future to one in which questions about innovation become at least as prominent would likely depend in part on the ideology of researchers now in the field, and of those recruited to it. Bell, N. Bell and E. New York: The Free Press. Council on Families in America.

Doherty, W.