Symbolic Interaction Theory

While we all tend to generalize from our own personal experience, our "common sense" understanding of family life (from experience, tradition, authority and media) is typically a poor source of accurate and reliable knowledge.
If we really want to know about how families work we would be better informed by seeking and acquiring more trustworthy information.

A. In order to obtain valid research information, researchers and research consumers need to keep in mind the rules of critical (clear and unbiased) thinking.

B. Personal experience creates personal perspectives, values and beliefs, which can create blinders that keep people from accurately reading research information.

C. Objectivity in approaching information means that we suspend
Interactions are reciprocal acts that take place between people and are conducted through symbols, words, or gestures that stand form something else.
2. The family can be seen as a unity of interacting personalities, with each member having a social role.
a. Over time, our interactions and relationships define the nature of our family.
b. Our identities emerge from the interplay between our unique selves and our social roles.
3. Symbolic interaction has several weaknesses.
a. Symbolic interaction tends to minimize the role of power in relationships.
b. It does not account for the psychological aspects of life, emphasizes individualism, and does not place marriage or family within a larger social context.

D. Social Exchange Theory examines actions and relationships in terms of cost and benefits.
1. Much of this cost-benefit analysis is unconscious.
2. In personal relationships, resources, rewards, and costs are more likely to be things like love companionship, status, power, fear and lonliness, rather than tangibles, such as money.
3. People consciously or unconsciously use their various resources to obtain what they want.
4. Exchanges that occur have to be fair and must have equity. Both partners feel uneasy in an inequitable
If there barriers are too great exchange theory would predict that we would stay, even unhappily, married.
7. Problems with social exchange theory include: it assumes rationality when humans are not always rational; it has difficulty ascertaining the value of costs and rewards; and values that are assigned are highly individualistic.

E. Family development Theory emphasizes the patterned changes that occur in families through stage across time.
1. In its earliest formulations, family development theory borrowed from theories of individual development and identified a set number of stages that all families pass through as they are formed.
2. The family life cycle model gives insight into the complexities of family life, the different tasks families perform and changing roles and circumstances over time.
3. The family career is said to consist of subcareers like the marital or parenteral career.
4. The family life course has been used to examine the dynamic nature of the family experience.
5. An important criticism made of family development theory is that is assumes the sequential processes of intact, nuclear families and assumes that all families go through the same process of change across the same