Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article reports on young university students’ visions of the future of the family in Ireland, a country that has experienced dramatic economic fluctuations and extensive social change over recent decades. Using a text-based role-play method, we obtained 34 students’ written responses to two different scenarios pertaining to the family. Analysis of these texts indicates a strong orientation to a future where religion plays little or no role, and tolerance and freedom to choose govern family formation. The fear is expressed that some groups may be deprived of the freedom to marry and have children on grounds of economic inequality. Together, these two visions create a dialectic between more freedom (in choosing values/partners/whether to have children) and less freedom (due to inability to afford the ‘luxury’ of family life), reflective of the post-Catholic, economically exposed context. We show that young agents draw on social debates, traditions, their experiences and social positions in imagining futures of the family, illustrating interplay between structure and agency. It is interesting and significant that some social forces are seen as catalysts of both ‘stronger’ and ‘weaker’ families, in particular religion/the Church is used to explain both decline and flourishing of the family in the future.
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