The average person lives too narrow a life to get a clear and concise understanding of today's complex social world. Our daily lives are spent among friends and family, at work and at play, and watching TV and surfing the Internet. There is no way one person can grasp the big picture from their relatively isolated lives. There's just not enough time or capacity to be exposed to the complexities of a society of 310 million people. There are thousands of communities, millions of interpersonal interaction, billions of Internet information sources, and countless trends that transpire without many of us even knowing they exist. What can we do to make sense of it all?
Psychology gave us the understanding of self-esteem, economics gave us the understanding of supply and demand, and physics gave us the Einstein theory of E=MC2. Sociological imagination by Mills gives us a framework for understanding our social world that far surpasses any common sense notion we might derive from our limited social experiences. C. Wright Mills (1916-1962), a contemporary sociologist, suggested that when we study the family we can gain valuable insight by approaching it at two core societal levels. He stated, “neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both" (Mills, C. W. 1959. The Sociological Imagination page ii; Oxford U. Press). Mills identified “personal troubles” (challenges on the personal level) and “public issues” (challenges on the larger social level) as key principles for wrapping our minds around many of the hidden social processes that transpire in an almost invisible manner in today's societies. Look at Figure 3 below to see a diagram of the Sociological Imagination and its two levels (personal and larger social).
Personal Troubles are private problems experienced within the character of the individual and the range of their immediate relation to others. Mills identified the fact that we function in our personal lives as actors and actresses who make choices about our friends, family, groups, work, school, and other issues within our control. We have a degree of influence in the outcome of matters within the personal level. A college student who parties 4 nights out of 7, who rarely attends class, and who never does his homework has a personal trouble that interferes with his odds of success in college. But, when 50 percent of all college students in the country never graduate we call it a larger social issue.
Larger Social Issues lie beyond one's personal control and the range of one's inner life. These pertain to society's organization and processes. To better understand larger social issues, let us define social facts. Social facts are social processes rooted in society rather than in the individual. Émile Durkheim (1858-1917, France) studied the “science of social facts” in an effort to identify social correlations and ultimately social laws designed to make sense of how modern societies worked given that they became increasingly diverse and complex (see Émile Durkheim, The Rules of the Sociological Method, (Edited by Steven Lukes; translated by W.D. Halls). New York: Free Press, 1982, pp. 50-59).
The national cost of a gallon of gas, the War in the Middle east, the repressed economy, the trend of having too few females in the 18-24 year old singles market, and the ever-increasing demand for plastic surgery are just a few of the social facts at play today. Social facts are typically outside of the control of average people. They occur in the complexities of modern society and impact us, but we rarely find a way to significantly impact them back. This is because, as Mills taught, we live much of our lives on the personal level and much of society happens at the larger social level. Without a knowledge of the larger social and personal levels of social experience, we live in what Mills called a false social conscious, which is an ignorance of social facts and the larger social picture.
A larger social issue is illustrated in the fact that nationwide, students come to college as freshmen ill-prepared to understand the rigors of college life. They haven't often been challenged enough in high school to make the necessary adjustments required to succeed as college students. Nationwide, the average teenager text messages, surfs the Net, plays video or online games, hangs out at the mall, watches TV and movies, spends hours each day with friends, and works at least part-time. Where and when would he or she get experience focusing attention on college studies and the rigors of self-discipline required to transition into college credits, a quarter or a semester, study, papers, projects, field trips, group work, or test taking.
In a survey conducted each year by the US Census Bureau, findings suggest that in 2006 the US has about 84 percent who've graduated high school ( http:// www.factfinder.uscensus.gov; see table R1501 at factfinder.census.gov/servlet...&-format=US-30). They also found that only 27 percent had a bachelors degree ( http:// www.factfinder.uscensus.gov; see table R1502 at factfinder.census.gov/servlet...G00_R1501_US30). Given the numbers of freshman students enrolling in college, the percentage with a bachelors degree should be closer to 50 percent.
The majority of college first year students drop out, because nationwide we have a deficit in the preparation and readiness of Freshmen attending college and a real disconnect in their ability to connect to college in such a way that they feel they belong to it. In fact college dropouts are an example of both a larger social issue and a personal trouble. Thousands of studies and millions of dollars have been spent on how to increase a freshman student's odds of success in college (graduating with a 4-year degree). There are millions and millions of dollars in grant monies awarded each year to help retain college students. Interestingly, almost all of the grants are targeted in such a way that a specific college can create a specific program to help each individual student stay in college and graduate.
Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): Diagram of the Seven Social Institutions and the Sociological Imagination.
The real power of the sociological imagination is found in how you and I learn to distinguish between the personal and social levels in our own lives. Once we do that we can make personal choices that serve us the best, given the larger social forces that we face. In 1991, I graduated with my Ph.D. and found myself in very competitive job market for University professor/researcher positions. With hundreds of my own job applications out there, I kept finishing second or third and was losing out to 10 year veteran professors who applied for entry level jobs. I looked carefully at the job market, my deep interest in teaching, the struggling economy, and my sense of urgency in obtaining a salary and benefits. I came to the decision to switch my job search focus from university research to college teaching positions. Again the competition was intense. On my 301st job application (that's not an exaggeration) I was interviewed and beat out 47 other candidates for my current position. In this case, knowing and seeing the larger social troubles that impacted my success or failure in finding a position was helpful. Because of the Sociological Imagination, I understood the larger social job market and was able to best situate myself within it to solve my personal trouble.
There are larger social trends that will be identified in the 16 chapters that follow this one. Some of them can teach you lessons to use in your own choices. Others simply provide a broad understanding of the context of the family in our complicated society. This free online textbook comes with 93 self-assessments designed to enlighten YOU about YOUR personal family circumstances. They are not therapy, and they are not diagnostic. They are simply insightful and designed to help you understand better your personal family circumstances.
In this textbook you will find larger social evidences of many current United States family trends. Figure 4 shows these trends and where they will be discussed in this textbook. These changes were initiated in the Industrial Revolution where husbands were called upon to leave the cottage and venture into the factory as breadwinners. Women became homemakers and many eventually ended up in the labor force as well. The trend of having fewer children and having fewer of them die in or immediately after birth is directly related to medical technology and the value of having smaller families in our current service-based economy. The trend of lowering our standards of what exactly a “clean house” means is an adjustment that arguably needed to be made, because the post-World War II marketing campaigns convinced women that a spotless house was a good woman. Today, good women have varying levels of a clean house.
Table \(\PageIndex{4}\): Diagram of the United States' Larger Social Family Trends and Patterns in Recent Decades
Lower
Higher
Number of children per woman (Ch. 10)
Percent ever divorced (Ch. 12)
Infant mortality (Ch.15)
Complexity of remarried families (Ch. 3&13)
Standard of a "clean house"
Percent of elderly families (Ch. 14)
Average life expectancies (Ch. 14)
Quality of adoption process for children and families (Ch. 15)
Benefits from being married compared to other statuses (Ch. 9)
Number of cohabiters (Ch. 9)
Percent of women in labor force (Ch.4)
Bankruptcies (Ch. 11)
High Yet Declining
Intimate violence by spouse or partner (Ch. 16)
Divorce Rates (Ch. 12)
Cost of living and percent of income going to taxes (Ch. 11)
Abuse and neglect rates (Ch. 16)
Political efforts for and numbers of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons (Ch. 15)
STDs (except Chlamydia) (Ch 16)
Percent of births to unwed mothers (Ch. 10)
Percent of families in poverty(Ch. 11)
Median age at marriage (Ch. 9)
K-12 education completion rates (Ch. 11)
Numbers of professional mediators and therapists to aid in individual and family issues (Ch. 12)
Number of abortions (Ch.9)
Premarital sexual activity (Ch. 7)
Widowhood (Ch. 14)
Satisfaction and hope for family (Ch. 17)
Percent of US families that are Hispanic (Ch. 15)
Estimated cost to raise a child in US (Ch. 10)
Importance of family to modern society and its members (Ch. 1-17)
Of concern to many are the continuing high rates of divorce. I fully intend to present you with knowledge about what is happening and what you can do to prevent divorce and enhance the quality and satisfaction of your marriage. These other relatively high, yet declining rates will be discussed in further detail, also providing you with information about what you can do and what works. The higher categories include many trends. Some may comfort you while others may threaten or concern you. I urge you to study them, to listen to your professor, and to ask questions about the things in the study of the family that become important to you.
Simply studying something does not imply that you agree with it or support it for yourself or others any more than studying diseases in your basic health class means you have to go out and get one or support others in getting one. One of the many benefits of being a college student is that it expands and broadens your opinions. I found in my 8 years of college and university that my opinions became more entrenched and I was able to better understand my values and defend my own views. By keeping my mind open and my willingness to learn new things, I graduated a better person than when I started. I challenge you to keep your mind open. Trust that learning doesn't mean changing for the worse.
As mentioned above, the Industrial revolution changed societies and their families in an unprecedented way, such that Sociology as a discipline emerged as an answer to many of the new-found societal challenges. Societies had change in unprecedented ways and had formed a new collective of social complexities that the world had never witnessed before. Western Europe was transformed by the industrial revolution. culture . The Industrial Revolution transformed society at every level. Look at Table \(\PageIndex{5}\) below to see pre and post-Industrial Revolution social patterns and how different they were.
Table \(\PageIndex{5}\): Pre-Industrial and Post-Industrial Revolution Social Patterns
Pre-Industrial Revolution
Post-Industrial Revolution
Farm/Cottage
Factories
Family Work
Breadwinners/Homemakers
Small Towns
Large Cities
Large Families
Small Families
Homogamous Towns
Heterogamous Cities
Lower Standards of Living
Higher Standards of Living
People Died Younger
People Die Older
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, families lived on smaller farms and every able member of the family did work to support and sustain the family economy. Towns were small and very similar (homogamy) and families were large (more children=more workers). There was a lower standard of living and because of poor sanitation people died earlier. After the Industrial Revolution, farm work was replaced by factory work. Men left their homes and became breadwinners earning money to buy many of the goods that used to be made by hand at home (or bartered for by trading one's own homemade goods with another's). Women became the supervisors of home work. Much was still done by families to develop their own home goods while many women and children also went to the factories to work. Cities became larger and more diverse (heterogamy). Families became smaller (less farm work required fewer children). Eventually, standards of living increased and death rates declined.
It is important to note the value of women's work before and after the Industrial Revolution. Hard work was the norm and still is today for most women. Homemaking included much unpaid work. For example, my 93 year old Granny is an example of this. She worked hard her entire life both in a cotton factory and at home raising her children, grand-children, and at times great grand-children. When I was a boy, she taught me how to make lye soap by saving the fat from animals they ate. She'd take a metal bucket and poked holes in the bottom of it. Then she burned twigs and small branches until a pile of ashes built up in the bottom of the bucket. After that she filtered water from the well through the ashes and collected the lye water runoff in a can. She heated the animal fat and mixed it in the lye water from the can. When it cooled, it was cut up and used as lye soap. They'd also take that lye water runoff and soak dried white corn in it. The corn kernel shells would become loose and slip off after being soaked. They'd rinse this and use it for hominy. Or grind it up and make grits from it. We'll talk more about women and work in Chapter 4.
These pre and post-industrial changes impacted all of Western civilization because the Industrial Revolution hit all of these countries about the same way, Western Europe, United States, Canada, and later Japan and Australia. The Industrial Revolution brought some rather severe social conditions which included deplorable city living conditions, crowding, crime, extensive poverty, inadequate water and sewage, early death, frequent accidents, extreme pressures on families, and high illness rates. Today, sociology continues to rise to the call of finding solutions and answers to complex social problems, especially in the family.
Opportunity
In the US and throughout the world there are rich and poor families. Where you belong has a great deal to do with who you were born to or adopted by. Where you end up in your economic standing has a great deal to do with how you act, given your own set of life chances. As identified by Max Weber, life chances are access to basic opportunities and resources in the marketplace. There are differences among family systems in which people live and have opportunities. This brings up a very important concept from Max Weber. Not all of us have the same life chances as others. For example, one of my best friends in high school came from a wealthy family. Her father was a neurosurgeon and they had many resources that myself and others like me didn't have (she and I were friends because we dated for a short while). When I went to college, I was the first ever on either my mother or father's side to go to college. I had no financial aid, no family support, and such bad high school grades that I had no scholarship funding. My friend on the other hand had a new car, new Apple computer, all expenses paid apartment and living costs. She and I had very different life chances from one another. Nevertheless I was able to earn my PhD. I worked numerous part-time jobs and eventually got my GPA high enough to earn a scholarship, and later graduate assistantship. I also had to take out thousands in student loans. But, even I had far greater life chances than most people in the world today. So did you. We have K-12 education, access to college, and the possibility of a career of our choosing. In many less developed countries low to no formal education is common fare.
Life chances can also be applied to the quality of your own marriage and family. If you came from a highly shaming family culture, then you are more likely to develop an addiction. If you came from a family where the parents divorced, then you are more likely to divorce. If you were born to a single mother you are more likely to become a single mother or father. These are known correlates but not causes. In other words you may be slightly disadvantaged because of the difficult family circumstances you were born in, but you are by no means doomed.
Understanding life chances simply raises your awareness by demonstrating trends from the larger social picture that might well apply to you in your personal level. For example, I have about 21 known correlates to divorce (see Workbook assignment to discover your own). My wife and I have been married now for 25 years. We knew we would have an uphill battle in some regards. But we faced our life chance issues together (still do) and try specifically to avoid some of the same mistakes our parents made.
Demography
Finally, the US family in our day has an important underpinning that influences the family in the larger social and personal levels. Demography is the scientific study of population growth and change. Everything in society influences demography and demography conversely influences everything in society. After World War II, the United States began to recover from the long-term negative effects of the war. Families had been separated, relatives had died or were injured, and women who had gone to the factories then returned home at war's end. The year 1946 reflected the impact of that upheaval in its very atypical demographic statistics. Starting in 1946 people married younger, had more children per woman, divorced then remarried again, and kept having one child after another. From 1946 to 1956 the birth rate rose and peaked, then began to decline again. By 1964 the national high birth rate was finally back to the level it was at before 1946. All those millions of children born from 1946-1964 were called the Baby Boom Generation (there are about 78 million of them alive today). Why was there such a change in family-related rates? The millions of deaths caused by the war, the long-term separation of family members from one another, and the deep shifts toward conservative values all contributed. The Baby Boom had landed. And after the Baby Boom Generation was in place, it conversely affected personal and larger social levels of society in every conceivable way.
The Baby Boomers are most likely your parents (Born 1946-1964). For a few of you they may be your grandparents. Their societal influence on the family changed the US forever. The earliest cohort of Baby Boomers (1946-51) has the world record for highest divorce rates. Collectively baby Boomers are still divorcing more than their parents ever divorced. They had their own children and many of you belong to Generations X or Y (X born 1965-1984 and Y born 1985-present). There are many of you because there were many Baby Boomers. The demographic processes of this country include these baby Boomers, their legacy, and their offspring. To understand the US family, you must understand the Baby Boomers and the underlying demographic forces in our day.
The core of demographic studies has three component concerns: births, deaths, and migration. All of demography can be reduced to this very simple formula:
This part of the formula, (Births-Deaths) is called Natural increase, which is all births minus all the deaths in a given population over a given time period. The other part of the formula, ((In-Migration)-(Out Migration)) is called Net Migration, which is all the in-migration minus all the out-migration in a given population over a given time period. In all the chapters that follow this one, the issues pertaining to the family are heavily influenced by demography's social force in the United States. This formula is not just a measure of larger social trends, it is also an indirect factor that impacts those social trends.
The Industrial revolution set into motion a surge of births and a lowering of deaths. After a century of this type of growth, billions of people lived on the earth. Eventually as the Industrial Revolution became the era of the computer chip, birth rates declined and death rates continued to increase. In Western civilizations this explains why migration is so important. Because fewer births mean less workers for the economy and more need for immigrants.
