The Life-Course Perspective and Changing Contexts of Families

Introduction

Families are an inseparable part of our identity, name, language, ethnicity, religion and nationality. What is this family? Has it always been the same or is it changing? Is it the same everywhere or does it vary in different parts of the world? Is family more important or community or individuals? Is family a source of nurturing and protection from the world's problems or is it a source of the problems?

The major theoretical frameworks that help understand family in an international context are the institutional, structural-functional and ecological frameworks developed by sociologists and anthropologists. Marxist and feminist family theories provide key frameworks that help a critical understanding of family. This chapter refers to all these frameworks, but uses the dynamic family life-course perspective to develop an overall contextual framework to study the diversity in families across the world, and lay the foundation for the subsequent chapters on different life stages.

The Life-Course Perspective

The life-course framework emerged from the family development theory that focuses on the systematic and patterned changes experienced by nuclear families as they move through stages and events of their life (White and Klein, 2008). The development stages in such families depend on the life transitions of their members. Key stages in this model include: young people getting married and bearing children, also known as family formation; parenting children and adolescents or growing up in a family; and older couples whose children get married and bear their own children. The focus on the Western ideal of the nuclear family in this approach is less relevant for the rest of the world. It is also [Page 330]losing its relevance in the Western world where the nuclear family form has become less prevalent. Another limitation of developmental theories is that they are ontogenetic (i.e. focusing on biological processes) and dominated by certain psychological models as they look for universal, predictable events and pathways. Glen Elder Jr (1974, cited by Hutchison, 2008) proposed the life-course perspective which paid attention to how historical time, social location and culture affect individual experiences at each life stage. In the context of the life-course perspective, Dannefer (1984, cited by Bengtson and Allen, 1993) has advocated for the term ‘sociogenesis’ which emphasises the sociological aspects of development as a counterpart to the biologically dominated ontogenetic models.

According to Bengtson and Allen (1993), a life-course perspective emphasises the importance of time, context, process, and meaning on human development and family life. They note five specific points as central to life-course concepts and theories, especially as applied to studying families: (1) the first and central feature of life-course theories is the focus on the multiple temporal contexts of development: this includes ontogenetic time events in the unfolding biography of the individual that alter behavioural schemes or processes (e.g. the transition from childhood to adulthood through puberty); generational time-events or family transitions that alter interactions or selves (such as role changes occurring when parents become grandparents); and historical time-events in the broader social or societal context that alter roles or values of individuals and families; (2) the individual is viewed as an active agent in interaction with social contexts and structures, with reciprocal influence on familial and social contexts; (3) the focus of the perspective is on process and change, leading to a dynamic rather than static approach to the study of lives and families; (4) the emphasis of the perspective is not only on modal or average trends in development over time, but also diversity across the range of patterns; (5) this approach emphasises the utility of multidisciplinary perspectives.

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