Family and the State of Theory.

by David Cheal
Review by: Edward L. Kain
Social Forces, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Mar., 1993), pp. 822-823
Published by: Oxford University Press
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822 / Social Forces 71:3, March 1993

book is as a referencework to ensure that family researchersare aware of previous

studies in their field. In addition, evaluations of specific studies and of research
trends are provided, based on positivist criteria of scientific advancement
(i.e., explicit use of theory as a guide to research,probabilitysampling and sample
size, and the employment of multivariatestatisticaltechniques).
The first chapter of the book consists of a review of family research between
1900 and 1930.The other nine chaptersreview empiricalresearchfrom 1930 to 1990,
on adolescent sexuality, marital and extramarital sexuality, family interaction
patterns and communicationprocesses, family resource management,religion and
families, family stress and coping, violence in the family, recreationin the family,
and gender roles in the family. For each topic the authors have attempted to locate
"all availableresearch,"using as theirmain sources the SocialScienceIndex,Inventory
of Marriageand FamilyLiterature,Journalof Marriageand the Family,Psychological
Abstracts,DissertationAbstracts,and the card catalog in their local university library.
Each chapter is organized by decade and by subtopic, which allows easy access to
the materials. Tables of references consulted are presented in each chapter, and
togetherwith the bibliographyat the end of each chaptera readercan quickly locate
any item of interest.A second volume consisting of about twelve additionalchapters
is promised.
This book will be useful to mainstreamsocial scientistswho would like to avoid
unnecessary repetition in research, or who wish to learn from the successes and
failures of others.The majordifficultywith the book is its limited vision of the social
sciences as they are presently practiced.The extent of this problemcannot be judged
until the second volume appears. However, the following point should be noted:
feminist research is practicallyinvisible in this book. Remarkably,this omission is
evident even in the chapter on gender roles, where feminist scholarship does not
even rate explicit recognition among "other theories that occasionally appeared in
the literature." That peculiar outcome is presumably due in part to how the
"literature"is defined.
Problems in defining the literaturein this study indude mainly citing articles
ratherthan books (thereare unfortunateomissions of books by well-known scholars)
and the use of substantive and methodological criteria that narrow the field of
eligible publications (see the chapter on violence in the family). It could also be
argued that a special effort should have been made to identify relevantpublications
outside "the family field," for example in women's studies.
This book is a serious attempt to increase our knowledge of what the social
sciences have accomplished.Used with caution, it can be a useful guide to research
on families in the U.S. However, readers should be fully aware of the book's limita-
tions and take into account other sources.

Family and the State of Theory.

By David Cheal.University of TorontoPress, 1991. 213 pp.
Reviewer:EaRW L KAIN, SouthwesternUniversity

The last three decades have seen diversity and change in theories about family life.
David Cheal's book explores some of these changes and focuses particularly on
modernism and antimodernism as well as on the impact of feminists and post-
modem thought upon family theory. The book's strengthslie in the analysis of how
family theory has been affected by macro trends in culture as well as in sociological

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 Book Reviews / 823

theory. Its weaknesses lie not so much in what the book provides as in what it omits
from the analysis.
The basic position that Cheal outlines in his introductionis very convincing. He
suggests that "sociologicalknowledge is an aspect of contemporaryculture,"and as
such it is shaped by changes in culturalpatterns.He quite rightly notes that reviews
of family theory that are published in differentcountries differ radically from each
other, and these differences are not random. Nonetheless, he argues that sociology
is an intemational discipline and that family theory is thus shaped by worldwide
cultural change and in the context of an internationalcommunity of scholars. His
examinationof the impact of modernity upon family theory as well as the influence
of feminist and postmodernists thought is well conceived and thought provoking.
Given this context of strengths, the rest of this review will point to several errorsof
omission in Cheal's analysis.
The opening chapter sets the stage by suggesting that "in the mid41970sthe
sociology of the family went through a Big Bang in which feminism played a
conspicuous part.... That explosion blew the field apart, and the separate pieces
have been flying off in different directions ever since." Cheal's description of the
recent history of family theory seems to jump from the dominance of Parsonsian
functionalism to his analyses of the impacts of postmodernism and feminism.
Almost no attention is given to the huge literatureon theory building and concep-
tual frameworks (e.g., Broderick;Hill and Hansen; Klein) which culminated in the
publicationof the volume edited by Burr,Hill, Nye, and Reiss in 1979.Downplaying
the influence of important schools of thought in the U.S., however, illustrates the
impact of culture upon theory. He says that "the mannerin which [he has] set about
the task of describing the various theories differs from that of most American
accounts of family studies.' This difference is a direct reflection of Canadian
sociology's cultural milieu, which has struggled to distinguish itself from socio-
logical work south of its border.
Cursory treatment of significant theoretical trends in the U.S. is not the only
missing piece of Cheal's analysis, however. Aside from some mention of historical
work, particularly in his coverage of the emergence of perspectives on the life
course, little attention is given to the influence of the new family history. Not only
does he ignore many of the majorAmericanresearchers(Demos,Greven,Lockridge,
Smith), but there is almost no reference to the influential contributionsof a wide
range of Europeanscholars who transformedour understandingof families of past
times - in particular the French historical demographers such as Goubert and
Henry and the CambridgeGroup for PopulationHistory,including Laslettand Wall.
This group is truly internationalin scope, and their work poses significant chal-
lenges to what Cheal describes as "standard sociological theory." It is perhaps
because these researchersremain staunchly within a positivist tradition that Cheal
does not include them his focus is much more upon a move to postpositivism
within sociology, and thus does not find a place for highly quantitativeanalyses of
family change.
A final omission in this book is any mention of the importance of race and
ethnicity and how work in the area has posed challenges to family theory over the
past several decades. Cheal's book does an admirablejob of discussing how issues
of gender and class have transformedthe theoreticalunderstandingof families, but
it does not consider how these issues are intertwined with race and ethnicity - a
connection that would have strengthened his analysis.

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