INTERPRETVIST

PERSPECTIVE ON THE
FAMILY
 MAIN ASSUMPTIONS

• This perspective is based on how people use the family

to make sense of the social world which they inhabit.
• They see the family as an important social institution
which carries valuable functions for its members.
• Unlike the functionalists, they focus on how these
functions work for individuals in the wider society.
• They are concerned with how members of a
family work out the roles they have to play.
• They believe that roles are not fixed but largely
dependent on the particular circumstances of the
family.
• Interpretivists examine the family on the micro level and so look at the
interactions that are integral to specific family members. For example,
the roles of husbands and wives are defined during stages of family
life.
• It is the meaning that people give to actions that stimulates family life.
Ernest Burgess (1926) contends that the family is ‘ a unit of
interacting personalities.’ It is within the family that ‘ roles and selves
are shaped’ and further suggested that each personality has an effect
on every other personality with which it comes into contact.
• A further analysis of family roles is examined. For example, they look at how
conceptions of gender roles affect the definitions of the roles of spouses, and
how having children and transitioning into parental roles changes the pattern
of how people interact.
• According to Charles Cooley and George Herbert Mead, family members
adapt or modify their role to meet the expectations of significant family
members.
• Marriage is a crucial relationship as it provides a platform where the marital
couple can interact daily through conversations create a share view of the
world and their relationship with others.
• The private spheres of marriage and family is used to give
individuals opportunities to continually find themselves ,
especially in a world that has become very interpersonal.
• They believe that parents learn a lot about how to manage
their children by closely observing them. Parenting is really
a learning process.
 CRITICISMS

• They ignore the role that the wider social structure plays in the life of the
family: For example, Marxists and feminists argue that roles are not only
constructed through negotiation but through the awareness of how power
is distributed in society.
• While the family provides a forum so that shared views can develop; these
views are generally grounded in the social and economic realities of one’s
existence. Ignoring these realities can render these views irrelevant to
human existence.