The Discourse of Family Policy in Sociological Research

Abstract

The subject of the study is approaches to assessing the effectiveness and principles of implementing family policy in developed countries such as the United States of America, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Spain, Finland, etc. The main objective of this article is to compare the views of foreign authors and discourses of family policy, taking into account the diversity of approaches to family policy. Priority directions of family policy research in selected publications of foreign researchers were considered. For the analysis, the principles that allow to represent the discourse of family policy are identified. In this regard, the tasks were set to identify the concepts of family policy in the reviewed foreign articles for the formation of tools that allow: 1) to determine the general characteristics and features of various approaches to family policy of the modern welfare state, highlighted in the works of foreign authors, 2) to assess the unity of positions in the field of family policy. A methodological model called "semantic-structural" analysis was used, which is based on a combination of content analysis and the method of information-target analysis. The analysis of scientific articles by foreign authors allows us to conclude that there is a unified approach to family policy in the welfare states of Western Europe, Asia and North America. A common place in modern studies of family policy is the emphasis on the importance of economic measures associated with the work of family members, the possibility of strengthening the relationship between parents and children through the implementation of social policy measures. The conclusions of the study showed the ambivalence of family policy due to the lack of opportunity to form a unified doctrinal idea of evaluating the effectiveness of family policy measures. The question of assessing the effectiveness of appropriate measures, the priority of a "broad" approach in relation to solving problems within the family remains debatable.