The "Paradigm of Family Transcendence": Not a Paradigm, Questionably Transcendent, but Valuable, Nonetheless

Abstract

The approach many social psychologists take to interpersonal relationship phenomena differs from the approach sociologists traditionally have taken to marital and relationships. Thus I must confess at the outset that despite having enjoyed a long geographical proximity to several important contributors to the field of marriage and the family, including the late Reuben Hill, I am not well steeped in the sociological theoretical tradition. Moreover, a reading of Thomas and Wilcox's (1987) historical analysis of theory has persuaded me that this deficiency is not quickly remediable; as a consequence, much of the subtext of Bahr and Bahr's essay on transcendence must remain beyond my comprehension. But whatever its implications for the philosophical and theoretical wars being waged on the sociological battleground of marriage and family, I have little difficulty appreciating the relevance of their essay to my own theoretical and empirical interests within the rapidly developing multidisciplinary field of interpersonal relationships. THE PROBLEM OF IDENTIFYING CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS AND FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS The Bahrs' line of argument, in fact, engages the problem that helped convince many of us interested in relationship phenomena that the object of our analysis and the aim of our understanding should be close relationships whatever their outward form or type (e.g., premarital, marital, parental, friend, romantic). Although it long had seemed safe to assume that most relationships were close, and, conversely, that most close relationships were relationships, the validity of those assumptions became doubtful as divorce and serial marriage became more frequent and as the shape of the changed dramatically. It became apparent, for example, that many relationships between biological parents and their children were superficial and distant, whereas relationships between persons who were unrelated by blood, by residence, by law, or by contract often were regarded by the partners as their closest, most meaningful, and significant relationship. The difficulties this problem presented the field of marriage and the are reflected in the frequency with which the question What is family? has been asked in recent years (e.g., Adams, 1988; Gubrium & Holstein, 1990), with the answer to that question generally conceded to be in doubt (e.g., Surra, 1991). Partially as a result of the necessity to broaden the meaning of the term family to include an increasingly large number of relationship types, Scanzoni, Polonko, Teachman, and Thompson (1989) have even questioned whether continuing to think about a concrete subfield called the is the most fruitful way to proceed (p. 48). These authors have suggested that we begin to conceptualize the different types of relationships in ways that facilitate insights into their commonalities and differences and have proposed that sexually based primary relations may be a useful classificatory construct for interpersonal relationships. Unfortunately, their proposal appears to have met the same fate as other proposed relationship taxonomies (e.g., Fiske, 1992), prompting little discussion and even less acceptance. The inability to assume that relationships are close relationships also presented a dilemma for social psychologists. Because the dimension of closeness is believed to underlie most relationship phenomena of interest (e.g., see Clark & Reis, 1988), it became necessary to develop a conceptual framework that would allow the identification of a close relationship without relying on relationship type as the means of classification. (See Berscheid, Snyder, & Omoto, 1989, for a discussion of the problem in the context of their attempt to develop a measure of relationship closeness.) The conceptual framework for the study of interpersonal relationships that we outlined in Close Relationships (Kelley et al. …