Some Problems in the Study of Hostility and Aggression in Middle-Class American Families

Abstract

This paper is primarily an impressionistic sketch of an on-going piece of family research. No conclusions can as yet be offered. Instead, I intend briefly to suggest a frame of reference for the study of family hostility as well as enumerate some of the procedures of field work used in the present project.Much has been written about the family by many sociologists of various persuasions. Yet a large part of this phase of sociological effort leaves one dissatisfied. Admittedly data on our own types of family structure are hidden from clear view precisely because of their familiarity as well as their privacy. But this fact is not sufficient to account for the disparity between the experienced complexity of family life and the sparsity of published details made significant by a sustained and incisive theoretic orientation. Headway could be made by the use of a frame of reference which combines sociological with psychological considerations, without confusing them, and which draws its vitality from the impassioned analyses of the structure of large-scale social systems and of individual character as begun by Weber and Freud. At the present time family research seems on the whole to have made little consistent use of the leads of kinship analysis and to have by-passed a cumulative effort at spelling out the empirical details of the social structure of various types of American families. As it is, we hear much about the family as a “unity of interacting personalities,” about processes of accommodation or conflict, or about the kinds of valuation that marital partners place upon one another; yet we hear little of the intervening details which, in their fullness, would give us a sense of how indeed a family as an on-going concern functions and how the inherent or emergent demands of its social structure are met, how the social structure of a family is related meaningfully or functionally to the rest of the social system, and how any given family of orientation dissolves into successive families of procreation.