Family and Household

Sociology is the subject which looks at the social world around us, how the social world works and how it effects and influences our daily lives. People tend to accept the social arrangements in which they grew up as normal or too complicated to understand. The family is the natural way to bring up children and schools are the normal places for children to learn. For most people the social world is just there, challenging their lives, they cannot change it and it is not really worth while trying to understand it. There is a consequence of that argument, which is when people try to understand their place in society, rich or poor, isolated or popular; they usually do so by saying it is their personal abilities, weaknesses and situations that cause them to be as they are. Sociologists do not fully agree with this, they regard it as their job to understand society and the way it affects different people. They do this by using certain concepts such as, values, beliefs, norms and identity, they also look at different theories, which are explanations that link together social events and show how the social events have different effects on different people. Within this essay the writer will be looking at functionalism, feminism and Marxism and how the different aspects affect people and how they impact on the family and household.
Family and household are two different things, a household simply means one or more person living in the same home, where as a family typically means a group of people related by ceremonial and or blood ties, living together or in frequent contact. (Moore, 2001)
The functionalist perspective is one of the main theoretical perspectives within sociology. It has its origins in the likes of Emile Durkheim, who was especially interested in how social order is possible and how it remains relatively stable. Functionalism was the dominant branch of western sociology until the 1960s, since when it has been increasingly criticised by sociologists,

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