Family, Forms of

Forms regarding Structure and Composition

In his influential work Social Structure(1949), George Peter Murdock defined the family as “a social group characterized by common residence, economic cooperation, and reproduction. It includes adults of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or more children, own or adopted, of the sexually cohabiting adults.” The two-generation family composed of mother, mother's husband, and their offspring was defined by Murdock as the nuclear family. This form is mostly found in hunting-and-gathering and industrial societies. On one hand, in times of hardship and catastrophes, little help is shown from outside, which means that in the case of the mother's or the father's death, the children's lives become insecure. On the other hand, this form of family is well-adapted to a high-mobility life, be it the society of the Inuits or contemporary industrialized societies. This form of family is also common where there is a sexual division of labor. Murdock took this form of family as a universal human social grouping, but he also recognized that among the majority of world's societies, “nuclear families are combined, like atoms in a molecule, into larger aggregates.” This composite family form is called the extended family.

The extended family, in the broad sense of the term, is a family, usually coresiding, consisting of more members than children and parents. An extended family may include grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and so on. One important form of an extended family consists of two or more nuclear families affiliated through an extension of parent-child relationships, the nuclear family of a married adult joined to that of his and/or her parents (an extended family in the narrow sense of the term). An extended family need not to live in the same household. Kin provides the core relationship here. In times of crisis or hardship, families pooled resources among households, and kin moved between households, extending the nuclear family to more complex forms. This is not restricted to non-Euro-American cultures or to the past. Research in Scotland and northern England in the 1980s, for example, suggested that the extended family was as important as the nuclear family in patterns of residence, household composition, and access to resources during periods of unemployment. Some researchers use the term joint family to refer to an extended family composed of nuclear families linked together by sibling ties. Much debate, moreover, has centered on the supposed breakdown of extended families with industrialization. But much of this debate rests on an oversimplified dichotomization of nuclear and extended forms of the family without defining what is meant by “extended-family ties” and which kinds of extended families are talked about. Murdock based his typology of extended families on the prevailing rule of residence. He distinguished the patrilocal, the matrilocal, the bilocal, and the avunculocal extended family (see the following variations in residence pattern). Extended families are often transitory and dissolving at the death of the parents, when inheritance makes it possible to divide family property.

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