Family Solidarity Research Articles

“Because You're on Birth Control, It Automatically Makes You Promiscuous or Something”: Latina Women's Perceptions of Parental Approval to Use Reproductive Health Care

To explore the perceptions of Latina women and healthcare providers about the role of parents in the young women's access to sexual and reproductive healthcare services. This qualitative study drew on 11 focus groups conducted with 95 young adult Latina women (ages 18-24 years) and 3 focus groups with 24 health providers recruited from clinics and programs with large Latino client-bases. The data were analyzed using an inductive approach. Young adult Latinas and providers emphasized that parents play an important role in young adults' access to sexual and reproductive health services. Some young women perceived parental support to access these services while others did not. The primary reason young adult Latinas and providers felt parents did not provide support was due to parental transmission of cultural values and beliefs, specifically: (1) a high value placed on virginity; (2) a presumption that unmarried women are not sexually active and therefore do not require sexual and reproductive health services; and (3) a belief that conversations about sex and reproductive health services encourage sexual activity and promiscuity. Findings suggest that young adult Latinas perceive parents as playing an important role in their sexual and reproductive health seeking behaviors into adulthood. Parents appear to influence their young adult daughters by transmitting the cultural values they have on virginity and familismo, which stresses the importance of family, familial solidarity, and adherence to traditional gender roles within the family structure.

ICT's impact on family solidarity and upward mobility in translocal China

Information communication technologies (ICTs) create new channels and repertoires for mediated communication among parents and their children in mobile locations, thus playing a special role in reinvigorating intergenerational family solidarity in contemporary translocal China. For China's rapid, uneven economic development since 1978, social mobility has been fast growing and many family members are separated into different locations for seeking upward mobility as reciprocal aspirations. Some cases of translocal Chinese, studying, working, and living apart from their elderly parents were studied to investigate ICT's impact on family solidarity within the new dynamics of more symbolic and symmetrical family obligations and interactions. Their demonstrations of redefined sociability and intergenerational relationships via connected presence provide a promising new direction for social support and knowledge exchanges in translocal China with a special attention to the multifacets of mobilities and localities in the lives of the contemporary Chinese. A new model of family solidarity is proposed by the proper use of ICTs as new channels for intergenerational communication to supplement but not to replace the traditional ways of ‘togetherness’ by face-to-face interaction among the elderly Chinese parents and their adult children in remote locations. And this is deployed to reinvigorate parent–child relationships of the ‘relational families’ characterized by ‘autonomy of the generations’ in a balance of individualism and collectivism for seeking upward mobility and social cohesion in order to partly solve the social pressure of aging population and rural–urban divide, especially under the special conditions of China's one-child policy and jumping scale of economic development.

Rompiendo la hucha familiar: Estado de Bienestar y Familia en España, en un escenario de crisis sistémica [Breaking the family piggy bank: The Welfare State and families in Spain, in a situation of systemic crisis

La situación de crisis sistémica que se viene desarrollando desde 2008 ha puesto de manifiesto las debilidades del Estado de Bienestar español. La masiva destrucción de puestos de trabajo y la precarización del empleo han dado lugar al incremento de las demandas sobre las instituciones (Sabater y Andrés, 2010). Sin embargo, debido a sus características, de nuevo son los agentes informales, especialmente la familia, los que están siendo el dique de contención de unos efectos aún más negativos de la crisis, no siendo un hecho coyuntural sino estructural. Pero la crisis puede dar lugar a que diferentes aspectos de la solidaridad familiar no se desarrollen en futuras generaciones, lo que nos lleva a reflexionar sobre el propio devenir del Estado de Bienestar español y el papel que juega la familia en su configuración.

Establishing Martin Luther King's Beloved Community for the Education of Black Youth

The purpose of this essay is to offer a vision of what educational communities could look like based on the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a vision that is both substantive in content yet flexible in its application to the diverse contexts of American schooling; a vision that finds its roots in King's personalistic theology (Burrow, 2006) and becomes fully captured in his idea of the Beloved Community. As Smith and Zepp (1998) argued a number of years ago, “The vision of the Beloved Community was the organizing principle of all of King's thought and activity” (p. 129). This paper focuses on the three principles that form the core of King's position (King, 1963). The first principle that King argued had to be present in a Beloved Community was “a recognition of the sacredness of human personality” (p. 118). This position essentially maintains that there is a theological basis for “the dignity and worth of all human personality” (Smith, 1981) and, consequently, that all people have something to contribute. The second principle of the Beloved Community is to establish an environment of freedom (King, 1963). As King wrote, “A denial of freedom to an individual is a denial of life itself” (p. 118). The final principle that the essay will explore is “the recognition of the solidarity of the human family” (p. 121). This position essentially contends that everyone is interrelated and that unless we all recognize our mutual interdependence, we will continue to fracture and divide along lines of race, gender, religion, and social class.

Long-Term Care Insurance and Family Norms

Abstract: Long-term care (LTC) is mainly provided by the family and subsidiarily by the market and the government. To understand the role of these three institutions, it is important to understand the motives and the working of family solidarity. In this paper, we focus on the case when LTC is provided by children to their dependent parents out of some norm that has been inculcated to them during their childhood by some exemplary behavior of their parents towards their own parents. In the first part, we look at the interaction between the family and the market in providing for LTC. The key parameters are the probability of dependence, the probability of having a norm-abiding child and the loading factor. In the second part, we introduce the government which has a double mission: correct for a prevailing externality and redistribute resources across heterogeneous households.

Domestic Workers in N'Djamena City: A Case Study of Domestics from Rural Exodus and Domestics Under Protection

Despite large development projects initiated here and there by Chadian government after the operations of the Doba oil basin in southern Chad and many other projects of development, the deep pockets of poverty are increasing in rural areas. Efforts to ensure a decent standard of living for all Chadians have not increased the purchasing power of certain social strata’s. As consequence, villages emptied of their young populations. N'Djamena the capital is the focal t ultimo point of destination. In this town where they are boys, girls and sometimes married women; devoted to the work of domestic with salary totally too slow. In addition to this group of workers, there are children who, for reasons of family solidarity, were brought in this city by relatives for education. Unfortunately, they are operated as domestics. The phenomenon is growing in such a way that there is a call on practitioners to abandon this. Face with this situation, efforts must be combined to assure adequate future to rural people in general and children in Chad in particular. The development requires the participation of all sons of the republic. That of rural people declared this day by government will become a reality if we do take into account the real problems of this world.

Biographies and family solidarity in Québec

In Québec, the 2004 survey Biographies et solidarités familiales (‘biographies and family solidarity in Québec’) was the first quantitative survey to deal with the question of the diverse forms of family solidarity as they have changed over time and in line with modifications in family, work, and public policies. Our purpose here is to present the survey itself along with a certain number of its results. The latter bear, on the one hand, on what we have termed Québec ‘family solidarity spaces’, referring by that to the structural data previous to forms of solidarity as we know them now and, on the other hand, on the changes in the provision of early childhood care over three generations.

Ageing Populations in Post‐Industrial Democracies: Comparative Studies of Policies and PoliticsVanhuysse, Peter and GoerresAchim (eds.) New York, Routledge (2012), 274 p., ISBN 978‐0‐415‐60382‐9

Ageing Populations in Post‐Industrial Democracies: Comparative Studies of Policies and PoliticsVanhuysse, Peter and GoerresAchim (eds.) New York, Routledge (2012), 274 p., ISBN 978‐0‐415‐60382‐9

Family networks and solidarity: continuity and change

At the end of the 1960s it had become obvious that the family as an object of analysis could not be reduced to the nuclear family. During the following decades, the focus of analysis has shifted from the statistical concept of household, implicitly related to the nuclear family to ties between households and intergenerational relationships. At present, it appears that the individual would shape her entourage of parents and significant others by combining affinities, space, distance, and proximity. This opens a new way of looking at the family with new tools for observation and new definitions. This themed section includes six articles based on surveys on the family networks conducted by researchers from different European countries and Quebec, where some fundamental questions related to this new approach are discussed. It appears that family networks play an important role in supporting social change and that they reveal the crucial role played by women hidden in the household and nuclear family paradigm. Finally, the question of continuity of the generational chain is analyzed in the change-oriented baby-boom generation.

Baby boomers and their entourage

The post-war generation of baby boomers has witnessed major transformations in family life as well as being at the vanguard of them. A study undertaken in Paris and London in 2006 among 90 individuals born between 1945 and 1954 reveals, however, strong relationships with ageing parents and adult children. Family groups based on local or dispersed entourages, with regular contact and the exchange of support, are clearly identified. Other configurations include families where affective ties persist but contact between the baby boomers and their entourage is less frequent. Few baby boomers have replaced family members with friends or remain socially isolated. These results show that the rise of individualism associated with the baby boomers has not weakened inter-generational ties, although tensions exist between the demands of family solidarity and individual projects.

Individualization and Social Solidarity in Post-Communist Countries: Do Old Divisions Hold?

Social solidarity covers the effective principles of social organization in a given society. Such principles are manifested in formal and informal practices and shape the social contract behind the welfare state, which is the most important form of organized (formal) solidarity today (Koster 2007). By contrast, informal mechanisms of social solidarity rely on the networks of friends and family which play a crucial role as a resource for economic assistance and security when state-provided social care fails.The communist redistribution system constituted a “communist welfare state” of its own (Deacon 2000) and that post-communist development was a transformation of the welfare regime rather than creating it “from scratch”. In a cross-European comparison, Fenger (2007) discovered three post-communist welfare regimes that were not resembling three types devised by Esping-Andersen (1990). Moreover, the theory of postmaterialist values (Inglehart 1997) and the adjoining theory of self-expression values (Inglehart & Welzel 2005) that otherwise provide a breakthrough perspective on explaining how high levels of individualism and diversity in modern societies coexist with high levels of altruism and wide concern about fellow citizens, produced much worse results in explaining social solidarity in eastern Europe, especially on the individual level (Janmaat & Braun 2009).The research question of this paper is what imprint the post-communist condition leaves on the patterns of social solidarity in European countries. Additionally, I inquire whether post-soviet or post-socialist status of the country matters and then discuss how these findings correspond to previous research. Multilevel analysis is used to model the data of European Values Study (2008) that covers 47 European countries, including more than 20 countries with post-communist history.It was demonstrated that 1) postmaterialists in post-communist countries score lower than western Europe on both family solidarity and redistribution, which may be attributed both to historical trauma of communism and to the average economic condition of post-communist countries (thus, a different meaning of “postmaterialist” indicators in these countries); 2) there are interesting gender differences in post-soviet and post-socialist (Central European) countries which should be further explained.

Kai kurie tarpgeneracinio solidarumo šeimoje aspektai: Tėvų parama suaugusiems vaikams

Population aging in Western societies leads to the increasing interest in intergenerational support relationships. However, until now, the studies in this field have focused mostly on the upward family transfers from the younger to the older generation. The article discusses the role of parents in provision of support to their adult children, aiming to compare the types of given/ received assistance in different age cohorts and pursuing to reveal women’s and men’s roles as assistance providers to their adult children. These issues are explored based on the data of qualitative research, conducted in the framework of the project “Trajectories of Family Models and Social Networks: Intergenerational Dimension”. 60 face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted during June-August, 2012 in six selected regions of Lithuania (in rural areas, small and large towns, cities) by four researchers of the department of Sociology. Talking about the informants, there were 30 females and 30 males, respectively 15 persons of each of four birth cohorts: 1950-1955, 1960-1965, 1970-1975 and 1980-1985. The conceptualization of support, as proposed by E. Scabini (2006), and on the concept of solidarity, as proposed by Vern L. Bengtson and his colleagues (2001), make a theoretical framework of the conducted research. The comparison of individual cases of two birth cohorts of females and males – the “older”, who were the recipients (in the past) and providers of support, and the “younger”, who did not have adult children and themselves were supported by their parents – enabled to reveal the types and strategies of support provision during the Soviet years and a period of Independence. Analysis of interview data showed that parents’ assistance to their children remains intense even after the latter form their own family, which demonstrates the existence of strong functional solidarity in families that is transmitted from generation to generation. Women are the principal childcare givers (they take care of grandchildren), while men’s role is more important in providing some specific instrumental assistance and financial-material support.

A Death in the Family: Death as a Zen Concept

This study is based on original research that explored family reaction to the death of an elderly husband and father. We interviewed 34 families (a family included a widow and two adult biological children) approximately 6 to 10 months after the death. In one-on-one interviews, we discussed family members' initial reaction to the death, how the family is coping with the loss, and the changes that occurred in family relationships. In this article we focus on family solidarity after the loved one's death and discuss one extended case from the larger study. In reviewing our data, we find that a Zen perspective is useful in understanding the effect of the death on family relationships because this perspective incorporates a focus on the paradoxes of life and death. As death forces the family into the "present in its fullness," the contradictions of intimacy and distance, past and future, and life and death, emerge. Members of the family explore existential questions about life, death, and intimacy, in order to find meaning in: 1) the life and death of the loved one; 2) their own lives; and 3) the family.

Latina/o Families: Solidarity and the Common Good

����� ��� Solidarity is a key virtue in Christian family ethics. Emphasizing the institutional and practical dimensions of this principle, this essay claims that inter- and intrafamily solidarity are critical aspects of a Christian family ethics emanating from Latina/o theological anthropology and family practices. Interfamily solidarity, exemplified by the Latina/o family practice of extended communal family, emphasizes the integral dynamic between family solidarity and the common good. Intrafamily solidarity simultaneously critiques abusive dynamics in Latina/o families while asserting the necessary dialectic between individual and familial flourishing. This articulation of family solidarity asserts a robust role for extended communal families in fostering cooperation across difference in civic life.

Normative and functional intergenerational solidarity in Lithuania

Current discussions in European countries about welfare policy focus on the issue how rapid social changes undermine intergenerational solidarity as a basic precondition of personal wellbeing. Therefore, intergenerational solidarity becomes a very important research area to explore several issues: (1) functional solidarity, or how exchanges of mutual assistance and support are organized among different generations within family; (2) normative solidarity, or how attitudes of familism/defamilism strengthen/weaken reciprocal support of adult children and their parents and what are expectations towards state’s support for family. The article is a study about social attitudes concerning various welfare regimes, normative and functional solidarity in Lithuanian families. The empirical data is taken from the Generation and Gender Program survey done in Lithuania in 2009. In our analysis of functional intergenerational solidarity we cover three areas of mutual assistance: emotional support, material or financial support, and assistance in taking care of dependent family members – children and elders. The issue of normative solidarity in Lithuania is also explored within the international context and how attitudes about intergenerational solidarity might be interpreted as a functioning social norm.
 

Du RMI (et de l'API) au RSA, les droits sociaux des femmes à l'épreuve des politiques d'activation des allocataires de minima sociaux

Résumé Cet article interroge la prise en compte du genre dans les minima sociaux qu’étaient l’API et le RMI ainsi que dans les dispositifs d’activation des allocataires qui se sont mis en place à partir de la fin des années 1990 jusqu’à la généralisation en 2009 du RSA. Repartant de la diversité des régimes de protection sociale et des modes d’accès des femmes aux droits sociaux, il analyse la manière dont se sont mis en place l’API et le RMI dans un système valorisant les solidarités familiales traditionnelles. Le mouvement d’activation des allocataires de minima sociaux, qui mise sur les incitations individuelles au retour à l’emploi à partir de dispositifs familialisés, apparaît ambivalent au regard des droits sociaux des femmes et insuffisant à lever les freins non monétaires à leur retour à l’emploi.

Solidarity and Human Insecurity: Rethinking Solidarity from the Point of View of Africa

AbstractThe practice of family solidarity is a fact in African societies even if the people are facing all kinds of risks from an early age, before they exert their activity to take charge. There is lack of civil protections as “social security” which covers individuals from illness and other risks thus transforming African societies into scenes where violence and social insecurity reigns. Under these conditions, the freedom of the individual is in question as well as the protection of citizens, taking into account the risks to life, work, education, health, other environment. The social role to be played by the rule of law is also in question. But the bond of solidarity is primarily ethical. It binds one human to another, beyond the laws and social institutions.

농촌 주민의 자살생각 예측요인 -도시 주민의 자살생각 예측요인과의 비교를 중심으로-

The purpose of this study was to identify the predictors of suicidal ideation of rural residents. This study was based on predictors of suicidal ideation of urban residents. The participants were adolescents, adults, and seniors sampled from 10 provinces all over the country, from May to Aug, 2010. The data for the study were analysed as decision tree analysis. The major results of the study were as follows. First, a main predictor of suicidal ideation for rural residents was high depression. Unlike rural residents, urban residents reporting high depression and influence of mass media showed high suicidal ideation. Second, interaction of depression and family solidarity was important predictor of suicide ideation both rural and urban residents, but a condition that effects the situation differed between rural and urban residents. Rural residents reporting high depression and high family solidarity showed high suicidal ideation, urban residents reporting low depression and high family solidarity showed low suicidal ideation. Stress was also operate differently. Rural residents reporting moderate depression, low family solidarity and high stress showed high suicidal ideation, but stress of urban resident was not a important predictors of suicidal ideation. And rural residents reporting low depression and low stress showed the lowest level of suicidal ideation, urban residents reporting low family solidarity and low depression showed the lowest level of suicidal ideation.

FAMILY SOLIDARITY AND INFORMAL CARE: THE CASE OF CARE FOR PEOPLE WITH DEMENTIA

According to Bayertz the core meaning of solidarity is the perception of mutual obligations between the members of a community. This definition leaves open the various ways solidarity is perceived by individuals in different communities and how it manifests itself in a particular community. This paper explores solidarity as manifested in the context of families in respect of caregiving for a family member who has become dependent because of disease or illness. Though family caregiving is based on the same perception of mutual obligation as the solidarity that supports welfare arrangements in society, the manifestation of solidarity in families is different. Solidarity that underpins welfare arrangements is based on a perception of mutual obligation towards an anonymous dependent other and is enforced by the government. Solidarity in families is directed towards a concrete other and is based on free choice, albeit often accompanied by a strong sense of personal duty. In this paper we try to distinguish between solidarity as a sociological concept and as a moral concept. An important moral element of solidarity, as expressed in families, is the need for recognition of family caregivers, not only of their concrete practical efforts, but also of their own identity as caregivers and as individuals. We illustrate this argument by referring to examples in the Nuffield Council on Bioethics report Dementia: ethical issues, about the experiences of family caregivers in dementia care and the importance for them of recognition of their role.

SOLIDARITY FOR GLOBAL HEALTH

This paper introduces a special issue of the journal Bioethics devoted to the exploration of the role of solidarity in health. Papers in the special issue include Solidarity in Contemporary Bioethics – Towards a New Approach by Barbara Prainsack and Alena Buyx; A Dialectic of Cooperation and Competition: Solidarity and Universal Health Care Provision by Samuel Butler; Family Solidarity and Informal Care: The Case of Care for People with Dementia by Ruud ter Meulen and Katherine Wright; Solidarity, Children and Research by Barry Lyons; Altruism or Solidarity? The Motives for Organ Donation and Two Proposals by Ben Saunders; and Global Solidarity, Migration and Global Health Inequality by Lisa Eckenwiler, Christine Straehle, and Ryoa Chung. After reviewing the included papers, the introduction highlights the critical issues that remain if solidarity is to provide a viable normative principle for the distribution of health resources and the analysis of a wide range of bioethical problems. The introduction points in particular to solidarity’s association with partiality as especially problematic, and asks whether solidarity can maintain its forcefulness and efficacy as a guiding principle in a global context if it were stripped of its partiality. Without answering the questions, the introduction presents the special issue as a forum for its illumination.