he purpose of these recap discussion boards is to create dialogue and analytical discourse about the material covered in the chapter.
due5/13
The purpose of these recap discussion boards is to create dialogue and analytical discourse about the material covered in the chapter. In answering the recap discussion questions, you should engage in meaningful discussion with your fellow classmates. Please make sure to pay close attention to the specific due dates for each discussion board. You can contact me directly if you have any questions.
Due Dates:
**Initial post due 05/13
Please respond to the following questions with at least 5-7 sentence paragraph responses per question.
**Secondary posts due 05/15
You should respond to at least two of your classmates post by the above due date. Your responses should be substantial, meaning they should be about 5-7 sentences in length and relate to your classmates post in some way. Please review the discussion board rubric on the course site for an elaboration on the grading criteria.
Question:
What are the benefits/disadvantages of being married? (list at least 5 of each) What are the ways that culture (e.g. mass media, education systems, religion, etc.) promote the idea that everyone should get married? How do age, gender and sex influence the pressure one feels to get married? What are some advantages of being single? How might age, gender and sex affect singlehood?
INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY
Chapter 14: MARRIAGE AND FAMILY
COLLEGE PHYSICS
Chapter # Chapter Title
PowerPoint Image Slideshow
A Sociological Approach to Family
Looks not at the behavior of individuals, but how family is shaped by a society’s standard of living and technology
How patterns of family life are linked to income, education, gender, and race
LOW-STAKES WRITING
What are some of the reasons why people decide to get married?
What is the ideal age to get married?
What do we expect from marriage? Do we expect too much out of marriage?
How much is too much to spend on a wedding ceremony?
Forms of Cultural Pressure in Mate Selection
Endogamy
Expectation to select a marriage partner within one’s social group
Exogamy
Pressure to marry outside the family group
Pool of eligibles
Population from which a person selects an appropriate mate
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What is Marriage?
Marriage: a legally recognized social contract between two people, traditionally based on a sexual relationship and implying a permanence of the union.
Elements of Marriage
Legal contract
Emotional relationship
Sexual monogamy
Legal responsibility for children
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Table
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‹#›
M&F3 | CH1
Table
Copyright ©2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
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Types of Marriage
Polygamy: Involves more than two spouses
Polygyny: One husband and two or more wives
Polyandry: One wife and two or more husbands
Polyamory: Multiple emotional and sexual partners
May have an open relationship
Pantagamy: Group marriage
What are the benefits/disadvantages of having multiple spouses?
Should polygamy be legal?
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Family
Group of two or more people related by blood, marriage, or adoption
Family of origin: Family into which an individual is born or reared
Known as family of orientation
Family of procreation: Family an individual creates by getting married and having children
Nuclear family: Consists of:
Individual, spouse, and children
Individual and his or her parents and siblings
Civil union: Legal significance in terms of rights and privileges given to pair-bonded relationships
Domestic partnership: Emotionally and financially interdependent individuals who live together
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Cohabitation
Two unrelated adults involved in an emotional and sexual relationship
Sleep in the same residence at least four nights a week for three months
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Cohabitation
Types
Here and now
Testers
Engaged
Money savers
Pension partners
Alimony maintenance
Security blanket cohabiters
Rebellious cohabiters
Marriage never/cohabitants forever
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Motives for Living Together
To remain marriage free
To avert risks
To boycott marriage
To dissent sexism
To live the American dream
To avoid economic disincentives
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Living Together: Do We Need to Marry?
Critics of cohabitation
Less stable setting for raising children
Can put woman and children at risk
Men can lose legal right to raise their children
Supporters of cohabitation
Living together is a private matter
Meets the needs of a diverse society
Pattern of cohabitation
After 3 years, 40% of cohabiting couples marry, 32% continue to cohabit, and 28% split up.
Cohabitation Effect and Living Apart Together
Cohabitation effect
Multiple cohabitation experiences has negative effect on a subsequent marriage
Lower levels of happiness
Higher levels of divorce
Is Living together before marriage better?
LAT: Long-term committed couple who do not live in the same dwelling
Criteria
Couple must define themselves to be committed
Others must define the partners as a couple
They must live in separate domiciles
Individuals who live together before getting married assume that doing so will increase their chances of having a happy and durable marriage relationship. The period of time while these engaged couples are cohabiting is superior to the time spent by couples who are not committed to the future.
Because people commonly have more than one cohabitation experience, the term cohabitation effect applies. This means that those who have multiple cohabitation experiences prior to marriage are more likely to end up in marriages characterized by lower levels of happiness and higher levels of divorce. Cohabitants tend to be people who are willing to violate social norms by living together before marriage. In some cases couples may move forward toward marriage for reasons of constraint rather than emotional desire.
Not all researchers have found negative effects of cohabitation on relationships. Reinhold (2010) found that among more recent cohabitant cohorts, the negative association between living together and marital instability is weakening. She suggested that it is the age at which individuals begin their lives together (coresidence) which impacts divorce, not cohabitation per se.
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Advantages of LAT
Provides space and privacy
Helps manage respective careers
Supports variable sleep needs and allergies
Makes time for variable social needs and blended family needs
Keeps the relationship exciting and helps avoid satiation
Provides space for self-expression and comfort
Helps maintain the desired level of cleanliness or orderliness
Helps in elder care and maintaining one’s lifetime residence
Allows partners to leave inheritances to children from previous marriages
The benefits of LAT relationships include the following:
Space and privacy: have a separate space to read, watch TV, talk on the phone, or whatever.
Career or work space: Some individuals work at home and need a controlled quiet space to work on projects, talk on the phone, and focus on their work without the presence of someone else.
Variable sleep needs: Although some partners enjoy going to bed at the same time and sleeping in the same bed, others like to go to bed at radically different times and to sleep in separate beds or rooms.
Allergies: Individuals who have cat or dog allergies may need to live in a separate antiseptic environment from their partner who loves animals and would not live without them.
Variable social needs: Partners differ in terms of their need for social contact with friends, siblings, and parents.
Blended family needs: LAT works particularly well with a blended family in which remarried spouses live in separate places with their children from previous relationships.
Keeping the relationship exciting: Zen Buddhists remind people of the necessity to be in touch with polarities, to have a perspective where we can see and appreciate the larger picture.
The term satiation is a well-established psychological principle—a stimulus loses its value with repeated exposure or people get tired of each other if they spend relentless amounts of time with each other.
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Categories of Singles
Singlehood: State of being unmarried
Never-married
Men are likely to be less educated and have lower incomes
Women tend to be poor, have mental/physical health issues, use drugs, and have children with multiple partners
Divorced singles have a higher suicide risk
The widowed are associated with depressive symptoms
The term singlehood Single individuals are often young adults seeking jobs/careers, adventure, and relationships. However, there are three categories of single people: the never-married, the divorced, and the widowed
Never-Married Singles: A disproportionate number of unmarried individuals live in large cities—New York, DC, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Boston. These individuals are often young adults seeking jobs/careers, adventure, and relationships.
Divorced Singles: There were 14.2 million divorced females and 10.7 million divorced males in the United States in 2012. While some divorced singles may have ended the marriage, others were terminated by their spouse. Hence, some are voluntarily single again while others are forced into being single again.
The divorced have a higher suicide risk. Spouses are more likely to be “connected” to intimates; this “connection” seems to protect a person from suicide. Of course, intimate connections can occur outside of marriage but marriage tends to ensure these connections over time. Spouses look out for the health of each other. Single people often have no one in their life to nudge them toward regular health maintenance. 50% of women remarry within 5 years and 75% within 10 years
Widowed Singles: Although divorced people often choose to leave their spouses and be single again, the widowed are forced into singlehood. The stereotype of the widow and widower is utter loneliness, even though there are compensations (e.g., escape from an unhappy marriage, social security). Kamiya et al. (2013) found that widowhood for men was associated with depressive symptoms. 32% of US population are widowed.
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Postponing Marriage
Men and women get married about six years later now than in 1950.
Women, 26.6 years old; men, 29.0 years old
Delaying marriage is a function of:
Spending more time in education
More women in labor force
Birth control technology and legal abortion
Economic conditions/uncertainty
Drop in overall childbearing
More freedom in forming relationships
Ways of Finding a Partner – Meeting Online
Pros
Highly efficient
Develops a relationship without visual distraction
Crowded, uncomfortable locations can be avoided
Can disappear quickly
Cons
Deceptive
Potential to fall in love too quickly
Cannot assess compatibility through computer screen
Cannot assess nonverbal behavior
Discussion: What are the advantages and disadvantages of online dating?
Increasingly, individuals are using the Internet (and attendant technology) to find partners for fun, companionship, and marriage. Individuals also use Facebook to find a partner. Hall (2014) compared spouses who had met on social networking sites (e.g., Facebook) with those who met through other online means—dating sites, online communities, and one on one communication. Individuals who met through social networking sites were younger and more likely to be African American.
“In the past 15 years, the rise of the Internet has partly displaced not only family and school, but also neighborhood, friends, and the workplace as venues for meeting partners. The Internet increasingly allows individuals to meet and form relationships with perfect strangers” (Rosenfeld & Thomas, 2012).
Internet Partners: The Upside
In regard to advantages, online dating services have become clear in their mission—to provide a place where people go to “shop” for potential romantic partners and to “sell” themselves in hopes of creating a successful romantic relationship.
A primary attraction of meeting someone online is efficiency. On the Internet, one can spend a short period of time and literally scan hundreds of profiles of potential partners. For noncollege people who are busy in their job or career, the Internet offers the chance to meet someone outside their immediate social circle. Another advantage of looking for a partner online is that it removes emotion/chemistry/first meeting magic from the mating equation so that individuals can focus on finding someone with common interests, background, values, and goals.
Internet Partners: The Downside
There are also downsides to meeting on the Internet. Lying occurs in Internet dating (as it does in non-Internet dating). Some online users also lie about being single. They are married, older, and divorced more times than they reveal.
It is important to be cautious of meeting someone online. Although the Internet is a good place to meet new people, it also allows people who have been rejected or an old lover to monitor one’s online behavior. Some people also use the Internet to try on new identities.
Other disadvantages of online meeting include the potential to fall in love too quickly as a result of intense mutual disclosure; not being able to assess “chemistry” or how a person interacts with one’s friends or family; the tendency to move too quickly (from texting to phone to meeting to first date) to marriage, without spending much time to get to know each other and not being able to observe nonverbal behavior.
Another disadvantage of using the Internet to find a partner is that having an unlimited number of options sometimes results in not looking carefully at the options one has. It is also important to use Internet dating sites safely, including not giving out home or business phone numbers or addresses, always meeting the person in one’s own town with a friend, and not posting photos that are “too revealing,” as these can be copied and posted elsewhere.
Apps
Online dating is moving from websites to apps on mobile devices. Seven percent of smartphone users say they have used a dating app on their phone. Tinder.com (on the basis of a photo) allows one to identify and connect with someone (who also selected their photo) in the area.
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Total number of single people in the U.S.54,250,000
Total number of people in the U.S. who have tried online dating49,250,000
Total eHarmony members16,500,000
Total Match.com members23,575,000
Number of questions to fill out on eHarmony survey400
Annual revenue from the online dating industry$1,749,000,000
Average spent by dating site customer per year$243
Average length of courtship for marriages that met online 18.5 Months
Average length of courtship for marriages that met offline42 Months
Percent of users who leave within the first 3 months10 %
Percent of male online dating users52.4 %
Percent of female online dating users47.6 %
Percent who say common interests are the most important factor64 %
Percent who say physical characteristics are the most important factor49 %
Percent of marriages in the last year in which the couple met on a dating site17 %
Percent of current committed relationships that began online20 %
Percent of people who believe in love at first sight71 %
Percent of women who have sex on the first online dating encounter33 %
Percent of people who say they have dated more than one person simultaneously53 %
Percent of sex offenders who use online dating to meet people10 %
Men lie most about; Age, Height, IncomeWomen lie most about: Weight, Physical Build, Age
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If you haven’t found quite what you’re looking for on an online dating site, you aren’t alone. Two thirds of online daters—66%—tell us that they have gone on a date with someone they met through a dating site or dating app. That is a substantial increase from the 43% of online daters who had actually progressed to the date stage when we first asked this question in 2005. But it still means that one-third of online daters have not yet met up in real life with someone they initially found on an online dating site.
Many online daters enlist their friends in an effort to put their best digital foot forward. Some 22% of online daters have asked someone to help them create or review their profile. Women are especially likely to enlist a friend in helping them craft the perfect profile—30% of female online daters have done this, compared with 16% of men.
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Dishonesty, Lying, and Cheating
Catfishing: Making up an online identity and an entire social facade
Purpose – To trick a person into becoming involved in an emotional relationship
Infidelity can be both sexual and nonsexual
Access to many ‘suitors’
Developing technologies that make it easier to cheat
Ways in which we can confirm the identity of individuals?
Dishonesty
Dishonesty and deception take various forms. One is a direct lie—saying something that is not true. Not correcting an assumption is another form of dishonesty.
5-6b Lying in American Society
Lying, a deliberate attempt to mislead, is pervasive. The price of lying is high—distrust and alienation.
Catfishing refers to a process whereby a person makes up an online identity and an entire social facade to trick a person into becoming involved in an emotional relationship. The catfish is the lonely person on the Internet who is susceptible to being seduced into this fake relationship.
5-6c Lying and Cheating in Romantic Relationships
Lying is epidemic in college student romantic relationships. Cheating may be defined as having sex with someone else while involved in a relationship with a romantic partner. Even in monogamous relationships, there is considerable cheating. People most likely to cheat in these monogamous relationships were men over the age of 20, those who were binge drinkers, members of a fraternity, male NCAA athletes, and those who reported that they were nonreligious.
Strickler and Hans (2010) conceptualized infidelity (cheating) as both sexual and nonsexual. Sexual cheating was intercourse, oral sex, and kissing. Nonsexual cheating could be interpersonal (secret time together, flirting), electronic (text messaging, emailing), or solitary (sexual fantasies, pornography, masturbation).
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Gay and Lesbian Families
2004: Massachusetts is first state to allow gay marriage
2013 Census data:
640,000 same-sex couples, 190,000 of which are married couples
1 in 4 couples are parents raising children
Same-sex marriage extends legal rights
hospital visitation, health insurance, child custody
Same-Sex Marriage
Recognized by the federal government
Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)
Legislation passed by Congress in 1996, denied federal recognition of homosexual marriage
Allowed states to ignore same-sex marriages licensed by other states
Promotes relationship stability among gay and lesbian couples
Some states have broader measures banning other forms of partner recognition.
Student Projects and Classroom Activities
Legality of Homosexuality Cross-Culturally
Ask students to research the laws regarding homosexuality in the United States and in one other country. Instruct the students to compare the laws in the two countries and explain why they think the similarities and differences between the two countries exist.
State Laws Regarding Homosexuality
Ask students to research the laws regarding LGBT rights in the state in which their college is located. In a classroom discussion, argue the effects of these laws on LGBT people and whether these laws should be changed
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More than 1/3 of people who identify as LGBT have had a child at some point.
6 million U.S. children have an LGBT parent
Public opinion divided on gays raising children
Research shows little difference in parenting effectiveness
Problems due more to stigma than from family form itself
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LGBT Parenting
Hetero-gay family: Heterosexual mother and a gay father conceive and raise a child together but reside separately
Lesbian mothers tend to have high levels of shared decision making, parenting, and family work
Gay fathers are more likely to coparent equally and compatibly than fathers in heterosexual relationships
While both gay females and gay males report increases in individual happiness during the first year of having a baby/adopting a child, relationship happiness decreases (Goldberg et al., 2010).
This drop in relationship satisfaction after a child arrives in the gay relationship is the same as what happens in heterosexual relationships.
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LGBT Parenting
Act of becoming a father has a positive outcome on gay men’s sense of self-worth
Children seem to benefit when there are two parents in the household
Gender of the parents is irrelevant
Children raised by same-sex parents fare equally well
Discussion: What are the concerns about gays and lesbians as parents?
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Gay parents are sensitive to potential stigmatization
Seek gay-friendly neighborhoods to rear their children
Children with gay parents felt less pressure to conform to gender stereotypes
Children of transgender parents struggle with new definitions of who their parents are and how this affects them
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Being open and honest about one’s sexual orientation and identity
Risks
Parental and family members’ reactions
‘Transparent Closet’ ‘Family Closet’
Harassment and discrimination at school or the workplace
Hate crime victimization
Death of Lawrence King
Some of the risks involved in coming out include disapproval and rejection by parents and other family members, harassment and discrimination at school, discrimination and harassment in the workplace, and hate crime victimization.
Parental and family members’ reactions
Svab and Kuhar (2014) identified the concept of the “transparent closet” to describe a situation in which parents are informed about a child’s homosexuality but do not talk about it… a form of rejection.
The “family closet” refers to the wider kinship system having knowledge of a child’s homosexuality but “keeping it quiet” (a form of rejection).
Padilla et al. (2010) found that parental reaction to a son or daughter coming out had a major effect on the development of their child.
Parental rejection of GLBT individuals is related to suicide ideation and suicide attempts.
Harassment and discrimination at school
LGBT students are more vulnerable to being bullied, harassed, and discriminated against.
The negative effects are predictable including “a wide range of health and mental health concerns, including sexual health risk, substance abuse, and suicide, compared with their heterosexual peers.”
Hate crime victimization
Another risk of coming out is being victimized by antigay hate crimes against individuals or their property that are based on bias against the victim because of his/her perceived sexual orientation.
Such crimes include verbal threats and intimidation, vandalism, sexual assault and rape, physical assault, and murder.
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PRINCIPLES OF EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION
Give congruent messages
Share power
Power: Ability to impose one’s will on one’s partner and to avoid being influenced by the partner
Principle of least interest: Person who has the least interest in a relationship controls it
Keep the process of communication going
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Challenges Families Face: Having Children Evaluation of Lifestyle Changes
Daily living routines will be focused around children’s needs
Living arrangements have to be made
Work schedule has to be changed to allow parents to be home more
Food shopping and menus change
Loss of freedom of activity and flexibility in one’s personal schedule
Financial obligations of parents increase
Challenges Families Face: Having Children
Pronatalism: Cultural attitude which encourages having children
Family, friends, and religion encourage childbearing
Government
Tax structure supports parenthood
Cultural observances
Special days are identified to celebrate parenthood
Discussion: Who pressures young couples to have children?
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Challenges Families Face: Having Children
Antinatalism: Opposition to children
Reasons to remain childfree
Great current life/relationship satisfaction
Freedom and independence
Avoidance of the responsibility for rearing a child
No maternal/paternal instinct
Accomplishment of career and travel goals
Discussion: How do you feel about other people’s children?
Student Projects and Classroom Activities
Is remaining childless a selfish act?
Have students write an opinion piece addressing the question above. After students turn in their papers break them into 2 groups and have a debate about the question.
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Individual Motivations for Having Children
Desire to love and to be loved by one’s own child
Companionship
Personal fulfilment
To recapture one’s own childhood and youth
To avoid career tracking
To gain the acceptance and approval of parents and peers
Discussion: What are some of the personal reasons people want babies?
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Brave New Families: High-Tech Reproduction
In vitro fertilization: uniting egg and sperm in a laboratory
Expensive; only 176,000 couples a year
Ethical and moral questions related to selection of physical and perhaps mental traits
Surrogate motherhood: One woman carries and bears a child for another
Legal questions over child support
Cultural Lag: scientific discoveries advance more quickly than our ideas about the acceptable ways to use them
Adoption
Routes
Public and private agencies
Independent adoption
Kinship and stepparent
Motives
Inability to have a biological child
Desire to give an unwanted child a permanent loving home
To avoid contributing to overpopulation
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ADOPTION
Least expensive forms of adoption
Adopting from the U.S. foster care system
Stepparent and kinship adoptions
Open adoption
Biological parent can stay involved in the child’s life
Open adoption benefits:
Adoptees learn early that they are adopted and who their biological parents are.
Birth parents are more likely to avoid regret and to be able to stay in contact with their child.
Adoptive parents have information about the genetic background of their adopted child.
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Problems of Internet Adoption
Potential fraud
Exploitation
Lack of professional consideration of the child’s best interest
Rehoming
Parents who have adopted a child use the Internet to place unwanted adopted children in new families
Child Care
Most married mothers are working mothers:
54% of those with infants
60% of those with preschoolers
70% of those with school-age children
Figures are higher for single mothers
Child care options depend on income
4.5 million “latchkey children”
U.S. government support for child care is the income tax deduction
Types of Parenting Styles
High on responsiveness and low on demandingness
Permissive
High on demandingness and low in responsiveness
Authoritarian
Both demanding and responsive
Authoritative
Low in responsiveness and demandingness
Uninvolved
McKinney and Renk (2008) identified the differences between maternal and paternal parenting styles, with mothers tending to be authoritative and fathers tending to be authoritarian.
Mothers and fathers also use different parenting styles for their sons and daughters, with fathers being more permissive with their sons than with their daughters.
Discussion: Which type of parenting is best for most children?
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Money and Relationships
Money is associated with power, control, and dominance
Effects of poverty on families
Poorer physical and mental health
Lower personal and relationship satisfaction, and death at younger ages
Relationship conflict
Negative effect on parenting
In 2014, a two-person household with an income below $15,370 was defined as living in poverty.
Poverty is the lack of resources neces
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