Reuben Hill

Life Cycle and Family Development

The developmental perspective on the family has placed the nuclear family, as a group, with its regular patterns of expansion, transition, and contraction, in the forefront for research, theory, and practice. Family development, as a conceptual framework for orienting research, and as a set of theoretical propositions that invite empirical testing, has uniquely pioneered the effort to describe and explain the processes of change in families. Family time—the sequence of stages precipitated internally by the demands of family members (e.g., biological, psychological, and social needs) and externally by the larger society (e.g., social expectations and ecological constraints)—is the most significant focal point of the family development perspective. It is a focal point that distinguishes the developmental perspective from other approaches to the study of the family; and it is a focal point that produces an affinity between family development (research and theory concerning the life cycle of families) and life course analysis (research and theory concerning the life cycle of individuals). Since its germination in the 1930s and its accelerated evolution from the 1950s to the present, the family development perspective has attempted to explicate the phenomenon of development in families—not simply change, which may occur arrhythmically, but development: an underlying, regular process of differentiation and transformation over the family’s history.

Families in East and West: Socialization Process and Kinship Ties

This volume provides a record of the first major activity of the International Sociological Association in Asia. The Ninth International Family Research Seminar in Tokyo has been the first occasion in the history of the sociological discipline in which scholars from East and West have met for prolonged scientific discussions. The general change in orientation in family sociology will surely open a new phase of development in this discipline. Since this change is a rather complex one, it seems evident that it will make itself felt through many distinctive features which, for the time being, have not yet grown into an all-embracing theory, although the consistency between partial aspects of our probiem is already astonishing enough. New forms of family life are coming into being which will be as stable as the old forms, and where the individuals concerned are bound together by strong emotional ties.

Sociology of Marriage and Family Behaviour, I945-56

Love, courtship, marriage, parenthood, and the family have only recently been considered seriously as objects for systematic scholarly study. The great majority of the careful descriptive writing about the family has been done within the last thirty years, and most of the systematic analysis of empirical data has been concentrated in the period covered by this trend report, 194 5 -5 6. Contributions to folklore