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Personal Life Perspective - Coggle Diagram
Personal Life Perspective
Vanessa May (2011)
Changes in society have meant that people often draw meaning from relationships outside the family unit
Greater diversity of family life and increase in lone-person households means that functions of family are often fulfilled by others
People construct their own networks of individuals – including family members – that fulfil their needs
Close friends who are treated as relatives, for example your mum’s best friend who you call your ‘auntie’
Relationships with dead relatives who live on in people’s memories and continue to shape their identities and affect their actions
Even relationships with pets- children frequently see their pets as ‘part of the family’
Smart argues that these bonds are often stronger than the bonds we have with blood relatives, and therefore those “traditional” relationships are not necessarily more important
Very different from traditional sociological perspectives such as Functionalism and Marxism, which tended to study the nuclear family and look at what functions this performed for the individual and society.
However, unlike functionalism the personal life perspective recognises that relatedness is not always positive’
The personal life perspective rejects the top-down view taken by other perspectives, such as functionalism but it does see intimate relationships as performing the important function of providing us with a sense of belonging and relatedness
The main features of personal life:
Memory is a selective process - the more meaningful an event, the more likely it is to be remembered - often involves personal realtionships
Biography or life history, the story of an individual's life is also important in understanding personal life - can provide in-depth descriptions for the researcher and help understand movement through the life course
Embeddedness is important to Smart partly because it helps to counterbalance the excessive emphasis on individuals in theories like those of Giddens and Beck
Relationality is concerned with how people relate to one another, and it plays down the significance of formal significance of formal structures within and outside families
Imaginary is concerned with how people’s relationships and memories exist as much in the imagination as in reality
Carol Smart (2007)
Argues that much of the research conducted into family life has been ethnocentric (It has focused mainly on white middle-class nuclear families)
She emphasis the fact that people can have meaningful relationships with people outside of the traditional conception of family
Relationships with friends who might be like a sister or a brother to you.
Close friends who are treated as relatives, for example your mum’s best friend who you call your ‘auntie’