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Revision as of 10:33, 16 April 2002 by -- April (talk | contribs) (+sociological divisions)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)In sociology and common useage, a family is a group of people, affiliated by blood (i.e. biologically related) or by legal ties such as marriage or adoption. While the most common form of such legal ties has been the marriage of a man and a woman, historians and sociologists have recorded countless variations of the family.
A nuclear family, in common useage, consists of a married couple and their offspring.
An extended family adds other close relatives. In America, before the term nuclear family gained currency, the term family generally had the meaning of the more modern term extended family.
In sociology, the following categories are sometimes used:
- bourgeois family: family structure arising out of 16th and 17th century European households, in which the center of the family is a marriage between a man and woman, with strictly defined gender roles. The man typically is responsible for income and support, the woman for home and family matters.
- conjugal family: like nuclear family, consists of adult partners and their children, with ties outside this group being on a voluntary rather than socially enforced basis
Compare: household
- consanguineal family: an extended family bound by ties of common descent (matrilinial or patrilinial), usually made up of several nuclear families
- egalitarian family: usually conjugal family where relationships are based on the equality of the adult participants
- nuclear family: consists of adult partners and their children, but may include strong links to extended (especially consanguineal) family
- single-parent or lone-parent family: consists of a single adult and dependents
References and external links: http://bitbucket.icaap.org/cgi-bin/glossary/SocialDict
Family is one of the levels of taxanomic classification of organisms. It lies between the less-specific order and the more-specific genus; ie, an order will contain one or more families, and a family will contain one or more genuses. Humans, for instance, are of family Hominidae.