The Family

Adoption is the institution through which a child is formally incorporated into a family unit to which they are not born, carrying the full legal and social status of a biological child.

Oakley pioneering sociology of housework treated unpaid domestic labor within the family as real work structured by gender inequality.

Lareau Unequal Childhoods showed how class shapes family child-rearing logics, contrasting concerted cultivation with the accomplishment of natural growth.

The avunculate names a specific structured role within the extended family, most documented in matrilineal societies where a mother's brother assumes duties otherwise associated with fatherhood.

Frazier The Negro Family in the United States traced how slavery and its aftermath reshaped Black family structure in America.

Burgess, working alongside Park at the University of Chicago, described the family as a unity of interacting personalities, reframing family sociology around interpersonal process rather than fixed structure.

One of the two household-composition patterns the family institution can take; see also Nuclear Family.

Furstenberg long-running studies of adolescent parenthood and family change documented how family structure and the transition to adulthood shifted across generations.

The Hindu joint family system is a specific culturally elaborated form of the extended family institution, in which multiple generations and lineal relatives share a household, income and property.

Marriage is the socially and often legally recognized union that most societies treat as founding a family unit, though the two institutions are analytically distinct: marriage is the union, the family is the resulting kinship and residence group.

Chodorow The Reproduction of Mothering argued that the family gendered division of childcare reproduces gendered personality differences across generations.

One of the two household-composition patterns the family institution can take; see also Extended Family.

Ohana, the Hawaiian concept of extended family, is documented as encompassing not only blood and marriage relatives but also close non-kin bound by mutual obligation, an expanded form of the family institution.

The zadruga is a historically documented South Slavic institution of the joint extended family, in which multiple related nuclear families shared property, labor and household governance under a single head.

Functionalist accounts treat the family as an institution meeting the reproductive and socializing needs of the wider social system.