Representations of family: a review of the alcohol and drug literature

Abstract

Family has a central role in youth socialisation, including substance use. Family is both the genesis of alcohol problems (through parental consumption or supportive attitude) and a solution, via family therapy. In contrast, family is not the primary unit of direct socialisation to drug use. Rather, attributes of family (such as structure, sentiment, and activity) lead to youth delinquency, which results in drug use. These representations of family are based on taken-for-granted notions supporting a Parsonian-style structural-functionalism, highly influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic ideas. This theory of family, permeating and uniting otherwise separate literatures on alcohol and drugs, reduces complex concepts to simple, easily measured static attributes rather than developmental or social processes; uses a limited repertoire of predominantly quantitative methods; imposes unwarranted normative assumptions; and has investigated a truncated selection of topics. A call is made for expansion of the epistemological, theoretical and methodological bases, to include contemporary social theory, such as post-modern, practice theory or Foucauldian ideas, and a range of qualitative approaches when studying family and substance use. Pluralistic, flexible, contingent, contradictory, partial and fluid depictions better represent family life in a context of rapid societal transformations, often with unpredictable outcomes, occurring via globalization, information transfer/communication and commodification.