Doing family

This paper draws on how constructions of ‘the migrant family’ in political discourse influence migrants' and their families' lives. In specific national contexts, ‘the migrant family’ is determined according to the national and European debates and expressed by their respective rules and regulations. By ‘doing family’, migrants and their families develop strategies in order to fit these requirements of living a certain family life. Fulfilling specific norms and perceptions which are not necessarily required for the majority of society is a precondition to succeed. Who is and who is not part of the family, who holds responsibility — such aspects have to be proved and repeatedly reproduced by migrants and their families. This not only affects their position in society, but also has strong implications on their lives as a couple and family, since it requires the continuous adaptation and reconstructions of their everyday reality.     

The welfare family

This article analyzes family transformations resulting from the impact of social welfare policies and modernization in Guadeloupe, an island in the French Caribbean. The analysis is taken from a study of three-generational families in which a “pivot” member between 49 and 53 years of age, one parent, and one adult child were interviewed. The study, combining both quantitative and qualitative methods, concerns the forms of cultural, domestic, and economic exchanges between the generations, in addition to the various social welfare allowances received by the members of the families who were interviewed. The results show the complementarity between public and family forms of support. They also show how social welfare benefits have transformed the respective social status of different generations, the functioning of family solidarity, and the ways that poverty is being fought.     

Inmate family functioning

Two-hundred-nine noninmates and 169 inmates completed questionnaires that assessed retrospective perceptions of 12 dimensions of family life and one overall assessment of quality of family life. Between the inmates and noninmates, means for all dependent variables differed significantly except for self-reliance; however, meaningful eta-squares were found only for dimensions of bridging, disengagement, and quality of life. Among the independent-samples t tests for gender, eta-squares were not meaningful. Implications for family life interventions in correctional facilities are suggested.     

Introduction: Adoption, affiliation, and family recomposition-inventing family continuity

This special issue deals with adoption practices and family recomposition in different societies in the past. Children's survival and family continuity were of major concern, and individual interests were linked, if not subordinated, to family groups. There were many different ways to perpetuate assets and power within the framework of the family. In Europe, systems that stress the importance of patrimonial arrangements houses are generally associated with the Roman conception of property, whereas systems favoring egalitarian redistribution within enlarged kinship groups have affinity with “barbarian” customs. In Japan, China, or on the Pacific atolls, we find other kinds of family systems, but in all of them adoption, affiliation, or family recomposition give priority to family continuity and well-being, inventing solutions to conflict, penury, infertility, and death. No future could be imagined without children, and the succession of generations was secured by these practices, resulting in early geographical, social, and family mobility for children and sometimes young men and women.     

2001年婚姻家庭法学研究的回顾与展望

举国瞩目的<中华人民共和国婚姻法>的修改活动,终于有了一个阶段性的成果.2001年4月28日,第九届全国人民代表大会常务委员会第二十一次会议通过了<关于修改〈中华人民共和国婚姻法〉的决定>.修改后的<中华人民共和国婚姻法>,其中许多制度引入了法学专家,特别是婚姻家庭法学专家的学术研究成果,为法学研究推动立法和服务立法树立了一个典范.     

Establishing a family of marks

In opposition proceedings, a family of HOG-based trade markswas successfully established on the record and found to be sufficientbasis to support an opposition against applications to registerDIRT HAWG and WATER HAWG.     

Strong and weak family ties revisited: reconsidering European family structures from a network perspective

Family systems appear to be an important factor framing people's individual behavior. Thus far, family systems have been primarily addressed on a macro regional level with indirect measures. Revisiting Reher (1998) and the family ties criterion, the main question of this paper is to examine to what extent we perceive family structures differently in Europe by taking direct measures of the structures of people's broader social networks into consideration. Based on the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we derived two indicators of family regimes based on individual-level data regarding the density of ego social networks: contact frequency and geographic proximity among network members. We aggregated these data and mapped them on the NUTS 2 level regions for various locations in Europe. The results of our analyses exhibit that, based on these two network indicators, significant differences in family structures between European regions exist. These results confirm the classification of strong family Southern and comparatively weaker family Northern European regions to a large extent, though substantial regional differences in and between countries are also revealed. Our findings demonstrate that the classification of European regions largely depends on which indicator of network density we consider. This is particularly obvious in the Eastern European regions where the classification markedly differs according to the type of network indicator. Intriguingly, social networks in Central European regions can be characterized as rather loose, often even looser than the ‘traditional’ weak ties in Scandinavia. Family regimes can, therefore, be regarded as a construct of multiple dimensions of which one dimension may be classified as weak while the other can be strong at the same time.