1. Summary
Chapter 2 discusses eight major theoretical perspectives on the family. They are the structural functionalist, conflict, feminist, ecological, family development, symbolic interaction, social exchange, and family systems perspectives. The ecological theory also includes 4 subsystems: the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem. The second half of the chapter talks about ways to research families. Researchers use both qualitative and quantitative methods, depending on what they want to research. The six methods are surveys, clinical research, field research, secondary analysis, experiments, and evaluation research. The last bit of the chapter also discusses the ethics of scientific research, including how often and in what ways ethics codes are violated.
2. Interesting Item
Something I found interesting was the box addressing online surveys. There are some good benefits of online surveys like being able to ask certain questions that a person wouldn’t normally answer face to face and getting fully thought out answers, but I feel like the limitations of this kind of method outweigh the positives. There are a lot of people who don’t use or even own computers/ the internet, and there is almost no generalizability.
3. Question
I would have liked to read more about the ethics and politics of family research. That section was pretty short and good additions to it could be a part about how families were treated before researchers followed an official ethics code and the types of things that were common practice compared to today.
I'm with you on the online surveys box. It was definitely interesting. Having eight pages on research and only a page on ethics I too think was a bit of a contradiction to the statistic of how often ethics codes are violated. The authors should have backed that up with more emphasis on ethics.
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