References Conclusion So far, then, we have seen that family meanings matter for individuals, for social policy and professional practices, and for family studies – both for the ways in which family studies are undertaken, and for the ways in which such academic work impinges upon wider understandings and social processes. Each area of family meanings may thus also shape each of the other areas. 4.4 Family meanings matter in family studies Researchers and students of family studies need to pay attention to family meanings because it is not possible to stand outside of such meanings. Thus, it is important to be able to reflect upon the ways in which these meanings shape and impinge upon research, and, in the process, come to be reconstructed and reproduced. Such reflection is relevant whether we are considering the interpretations of people's lives undertaken within qualitative research or the categories of households and relati 4.1 Family and meanings? We have considered the difficulties of pinning down family definitions and meanings. We now ask whether it is indeed important to explore and unravel these complexities. Do the varieties of family meanings – or the meaning of ‘family’ itself – matter, or do they just provide a minor intellectual diversion? You may like to pause here for a moment to consider how you would answer this question for yourself. Do you think they matter, and if so, in what ways? We consider this questi 2.4 The slippery language of ‘family’ Most fundamentally, however, we need to understand how language is used, and what ‘work’ it does as we interact with others in our everyday lives. As the sociologist and philosopher, Alfred Schutz (1954) argued, it is important to pay careful attention to the relationship between sociological and everyday concepts, since everyday concepts express the meanings by which social interactions are framed. So how do people themselves understand, encounter, interpret and evoke the very slippery c 2.3 What's so difficult? Morgan's discussion helps us to think about how we can develop research, policies and interventions around ‘family’ when the key term is so problematic. But we also need to explore further just what is so difficult about this endeavour. There are also some clues to this in Morgan's discussion, in which he points out that: there is a close linkage between everyday and academic language of family there is a whole variety of a 1.4 Structures of power & inequalities At the same time, such judgements and responses are not just personal matters: they are also embedded in all sorts of wider and interpersonal processes of power and inequality. These processes shape social policies, professional interventions, and representations in the media, as well as underpinning everyday social interactions in family lives and relationships. If we focus on family meanings, we may not always put issues of power, material inequalities, and moral evaluations at the centre o 1.2 Core questions The idea of ‘family’ is thus very powerful, at least in the contemporary cultures of Europe and the New World. At the same time, family lives have been under constant scrutiny from all sides – from family members themselves, politicians, professionals, and media pundits. And this scrutiny does not seem to be abating, as people and governments struggle to deal with anxieties about the complexities and uncertainties of changing and diverse communities in a globalising world. How do 1.1 Introducing ‘family meanings’ Wendy: What's important about being in a family? Juliet: I've got mixed feelings in a way, cause I sometimes feel they are over-rated … You don't have to be suffocated in a two parents and a couple of kids situation. To me that is not the be all and end all. … Fred: … it's the natural flow of family life isn't it. You know that you get old Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under licence. Course image: Bill Dickinson in Flickr made available under Author(s): 1 How arguments are used in the Social Sciences The audio programme used in this course addresses the issue of how arguments are constructed and used in the social sciences. It uses extracts from a radio programme (originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 1997) in which the social consequences of welfare provision are discussed from different viewpoints. The programme is organised to allow you to trace how arguments are being put together, assess what sort of assumptions are being made, and examine how forms of evidence are being use Learning outcomes After studying this course, you should be able to: understand how arguments may be presented in the Social Sciences. 5.5 ‘A sense of belonging and membership in which sentiment and emotion play an important rol Nationalism is about land or territory and what it means to people. Nationalists make claims to the centrality of certain tracts of land to them, to their people, to their collective history, traditions, cultures and sufferings: When a hundred thousand nationalists march down Sherbrooke Street [in Montreal] chanting ‘Le Quebec aux Quebecois’, they are not just talking about the establishment of a public languag References 5.1 How did we get here? We began this course by posing the question: what is a crime? Shouldn't we be finishing with a clear and unambiguous answer to this? Well we are sorry to disappoint you, if that is what you were expecting, but it doesn't look to us as if there is a simple, unambiguous answer. At the very least, according to Sections 1 and 2 of this chapter, there are: legal and normative definitions of crime; recorded and unrecorded crimes; the crimes we fear and the crimes that fascinate us; and stories of c 4.1 Exploring the claims about crime The claims of the common-sense story of crime that we unearthed in Section 3 were, broadly speaking, about the start of the story (how things were then) and the end of the story (how things are now). But most stories have a middle. A middle that gets you from the beginning to the end, that explains how one state of affairs is transformed into another. The former claims are primarily descriptive. The claim in the middle would be explanatory. It would need to address questions lik 3.6 Summary The common-sense narratives of the crime problem in the UK can be broken down into a series of distinct claims that make assessing them easier. Those claims can be tested against quantitative and qualitative evidence. Both types of evidence suggest that the narrative of change from a secure to an insecure society is at best partial, overestimating the tranquillity of the past, and the uncertainty and riskiness of the present. 3.2 Counting the crime problem What kind of evidence would support the claims of the common-sense narrative? Where would it come from and where would you find it? Most social scientists would start with the people who actually spend their time counting these things – governments. Government agencies of all kinds spend a great deal of time and money producing official statistics, recording crime rates, conviction rates, the size of prison populations, and so on. Learning outcomes After studying this course, you should be able to: identify criteria to evaluate the politics of racial violence. Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this
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