Family

Social Processes affecting Family

An elementary family can be defined as a social group consisting of father, mother and their children. Bohannan in his definition of the family emphasized the functional as well as the structural roles of the family. According to him a family contains people who are linked by sexual and affinal relationships as well as those linked by descent who are linked by secondary relationships that is by chains of primary relationships.

According to William J Goode at least two adult persons of opposite sex reside together. They engage in some kind of division of labor i.e they both do not perform exactly the same tasks. They engage in many types of economic and social exchanges i.e. they do things for one another. They share many things in common such as food, sex, residence and both goods and social activities. The adults have parental relations with their children as their children have filial relations with them; the parents have some authority over their children and both share with one another while also assuming some obligations for protection, cooperation and nurture. There are sibling relations among the children themselves with a range of obligations to share, protect and help one another. Individuals are likely to create various kinds of relations with each other but if their continuing social relations exhibit some or all of the role patterns, in all probability they would be viewed as the family.

A host of inter-related factors like economic, educational, legal and demographic like population growth, migration and urbanization etc have been affecting the structure of the family in India. There are many published accounts demonstrating that changes have taken place in the structure of the family due to exposures to the forces of industrialization. Nuclear status of family is considered as the outcome of its impact. Such an interpretation presupposes existence of non-nuclear family structure in such societies. Empirical...