SOC20280

This module will explore key issues within sociology of family. In particular, it will focus on how perceptions and experiences of family shift over space and time. Students will develop an understanding of key sociological perspectives on the role of the family in society. The module will explore the social construction of family, how the definition of it developed over time. This understanding of diverse family and household structures include topics such as same-sex parents, lone-parents, divorced/step families, adoption and reproductive rights of Irish women. We will consider how these changes impact individual and family relationships.

Within this, the module will develop understandings into concepts of kinship, parenting, ethnicity, diversity, social class, work/family balance among others. This module examines if/how new forms of partnership challenge traditional gendered inequalities that were structural to marriage and parenthood. Throughout the module we will develop an appreciation of how family relationships are constructed in the context of wider changes in social and economic conditions that constrain and shape the apparently individual and private decisions that people make.