The Czech Republic has completed the questionnaire on data protection and the questionnaire on DNA data exchange. An evaluation visit has taken place in the Czech Republic and a report on the evaluation visit has been produced by the Slovakian evaluation team and forwarded to the relevant Council Working Group. An overall evaluation report, summarising the results of the questionnaire, the evaluation visit and the pilot run concerning DNA data exchange has been presented to the Council,.
This site uses cookies to improve your browsing experience. Would you like to keep them? Skip to main content. This document is an excerpt from the EUR-Lex website. EU case law Case law Digital reports Directory of case law. Need more search options? Use the Advanced search. Help Print this page. Expand all Collapse all. Languages, formats and link to OJ. During these two years we collected information in varying degrees of detail about some two thousand families of all shapes and sizes within this large County Borough splendidly sited on the coast of the Bristol Channel in South-west Wales.
Our main purpose was to examine the immediate kin relationships of these randomly selected families, to determine the patterns and regularities in this field of social behaviour, and to consider their social importance. In many respects, a major Welsh town seems an excellent place for a study of this kind. Anyone with any experience of Welsh households must be well aware of the passionate interest that families, and particularly the women, have in details of marriages and relationships.
And this interest, and indeed delight in remembering and disentangling the facts and nuances of relationship, is by no means confined to themselves and their own kin. Both Rosser and Harris or Harries, with the same pronunciation are local Welsh surnames, particularly the former. She came from Fforestfach.
Have you got any relatives from around there? This was particularly true with older informants. The torrent of information and anecdote, rich with comment on the social history of Swansea since the turn of the century, which we came to expect from our informants concerning kinship relationships is ample testimony to the continuing vitality of these wider familial ties in an urban environment—and not least to the kindness with which we were received in the homes we visited. House-owners and tenants, the long-marrieds and the newly-weds, large composite threeor four-generation households and households of persons living alone, families with numerous relatives living close at hand and families whose kin were thin on the ground and widely scattered beyond the borders of the Borough, families long resident in the same neighbourhood and those recently arrived in Swansea from the outside world.
Consider the following list of occupations of some of the persons we interviewed or of the husbands in the case of the wives we saw taken at random from our survey sample—in this case, we give just the occupations of the first and last, taking the next where necessary to avoid duplication, on our lists for each of the fifteen Wards of the Borough: Even this brief list of breadwinners reflects the social diversity of the population typical of any large urban centre, and about which we will have a good deal to say in later chapters.
But these families have at least one thing in common in that they were all resident in the County Borough of Swansea at the time of our study. There can be little doubt, moreover, that it is a good deal easier to create a fictional family than to record an actual family in all its intimate and often boring and repetitive detail.
There is hardly a garden in England which is not surrounded by a wall or hedge or railing, the obscurer the better…. There is hardly a window in any family house which is not curtained effectively to obscure the view of the inquisitive passer-by. And as a consequence there is no play or book or film so successful as that which deals with the intimacies of family life which, except in one family,—his or her own—are a complete mystery to the ordinary man or woman!
He succeeds to the extent that he is the embodiment of tact and discretion, that his assurances of confidence are accepted,2 and in the end to the degree that his informants Bunderstand his 1 Margery Spring Race, Working-Class Wives, , p. The cases cited in this book all refer of course to actual individuals and families but we have, following the assurances given, altered names and various details such as inventing street names or moving street names from one part of the Borough to another to ensure privacy and to prevent identification.
Having said this, we must also add that we were continually surprised by, and indeed grateful for, the freedom and frankness with which the individuals we met in Swansea were willing to talk about themselves and their families in response to the curiosity of the social investigator. Indeed our inquiry in Swansea began in just this way with an encounter in Morriston in the north-east of the Borough which occurred during our preliminary reconnaissances.
This was a week or so after our arrival in Swansea to begin the study of family relationships here described. There were a dozen or so in the bar, some in working clothes having apparently just come off shift in the steelworks near-by in this old industrial community, all men, mainly Welsh-speaking and all well known to each other judging by the flow of conversation along the bar and across the crib tables. We joined an elderly pair on a bench in the corner and we were soon drawn, not of course unwillingly, into a probing conversation to establish who we were and what we were doing in Morriston.
Morgan the Milk was telling me that strangers had moved in. They were both Morriston born. Hardly ever watch it otherwise, except of course for the Internationals. The children come over most Saturdays regular bringing their kids along to see the Mam. Visiting time at the zoo, I call it. The Valley of the Ford of the Red Deer.
An essentially respectable home, snug, well-worn but immaculate, old-fashioned but, apart from the T. We spent many hours there at the fireside with Mr Hughes discussing everything from his boyhood in Morriston before the Boer War to the subjects of current controversy, the Sunday opening of the pubs or the present composition of the Welsh Rugby Team. Here are some brief extracts concerning the family relationships of this elderly couple. They need of course to be read with a strong Welsh accent: Do anything for the Mam and me, I will say that.
The boys come to see their mother when the fit takes them, sometimes three days in a row, and the girls are always in and out. Sometimes every day, but never less than once a week. He was an officer in the Army during the war. Peggy was a typist in an office in Morriston before she was married. And Mair is a State-Registered Nurse. His family are very well off—they run a garage selling cars and vans over in Fforestfach. I was only thinking the other day that I was one of sixteen in a Sunday School class at the Chapel.
I think there was about ten of them married girls from in the Chapel. Her father, Charlie Edwards, is a deacon in the Chapel with my brother, Sam.
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Ifor now—his wife, Glenys, comes from St Thomas down in the Docks. His wife, Margaret, is a London girl. Gwyn and Margaret and the three children moved down here about two year ago when her mother died. Peggy married a boy from Neath—I think they met originally at a dance in Swansea.
They started off with us here while they waited for a house. The twins were born here, and my wife brought them up while Peggy went on working. Then they got a Corporation house up on the Clase Estate, just about ten minutes away. Mair is a Sister in Morriston Hospital 7 Families in a Mobile Society just behind us here,and calls in to see the Mam every day on her way to and from work, except for her day off. Mine are all round about in Swansea for the time being, but Gwyn has only just come back this way and Mair and Haydn are talking about emigrating to Australia.
Children seem so restless somehow nowadays, always on the move.
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Now you know how it is, the boys usually follow their wives off to wherever they come from. We must count ourselves lucky I suppose that ours are all near enough to call in regularly. Well, yes, there of course is the real tie. You like to have your grandchildren around you and see them grow up and get on. And Peggy of course is always over with the twins.
Gwyn and Margaret bring their three over most Saturdays in the car—and I go over there about once a week to baby-sit for them while they go out for the evening. Gwyn comes over to fetch me in the car. Very quick-tempered is our Ifor. Well, my father was a Carmarthen man, came from a farming family in a village near Llandeilo. His parents died there, never left the land. My father could hardly speak a word of 8 Families in a Mobile Society English when he first came into Swansea round about We seem to be cut off completely from them nowadays.
My father started off on the roads, digging ditches and road-making. He landed up in Llangyfelach, up on the hill there above Morriston. Then my father got a job in the new steelworks that had just opened in Landore. There were new works opening all over the Swansea Valley at that time, and there must have been thousands like my father coming in from all over the place to get work.
They lived in Landore for a time, and so did two of his brothers and their families. Then the Dad moved up here to Morriston when he got into the Beaufort Works. And we all lived close, and went to the same Chapel—Seion Baptist near the Cross there. My youngest sister, Sarah, is a widow. She lives on her own in Cwmbath Road about five minutes away. Suffers badly with asthma but manages to get about a bit. But very independent is our Sarah. But we no sooner got there than the Dad went down with his chest. The Mam was left then, of course, and all the boys were married except for me and Sarah the youngest.
I was earning good money in the Works so I kept the home going. I was 23 when the Dad was buried. Rachel moved in here with us, and it worked out all right so Sarah was able to marry her boy and move out. The wife looked after my mother like a daughter until she passed on in , the year of the strike—she was 77 then and nearly paralysed for many years after a stroke. Rachel had to do everything for her, and bring up a family herself.
Both the sisters still alive and both widows for many years. The brother was killed out in France in , soon after the war started. He was one of the first to go. Their mother died when they were all young. Their father, he was a collier, married again and moved up to Clydach two miles away where his second wife came from. They have always kept completely separate somehow. The wife and her sisters were brought up by an aunt, a sister of the mother, here in Morriston.
He became the Chapel caretaker then, and was right up till he died. They always call in to see us when they are down this way. My wife goes up once a week regular, and of course they sit together in the Chapel—they all go to the Sisterhood, and very strong it is, on a Tuesday night. But in those days you just had to help one another—there was no Welfare State then.
We were all in the same boat together. All the men of the family, uncles and cousins and all, would go picking coal together up on the tips, or hunting rabbits and getting blackberries up on the mountain. I remember them coming to my house and making me sell my piano before I could get a penny from them. The lists were sent to the Masters at the Works and they knocked it off each week. We just had to stick together and fight, and help each other out if we could.
There are hundreds of stories I could tell you of my own family let alone all the others round here. We knew our duty and we did it. But then we were all in the Chapel, you see—not necessarily the same one, but we all went somewhere—and Welsh was the language for everybody. Only Dai and Lilian and their children belong to the Chapel and still keep up the Welsh. It really hurts the Mam to have to talk to them in English when they come over here on a Saturday. Take Tabernacle up there in Woodfield Street. Largest Chapel in Wales it is, room for 1, at least.
Some women now, they were great on the Bible. And what families they were—real characters, mun. If one of the boys was absent from the family pew—well, the Minister would be round the house on the Monday morning to know why. The children are all over the place now, and you never know where they are going next. Not that I want to put the clock back—I remember it all too well for that—the misery and the pinching and the poverty.
I mean real poverty—and no messing about. We lived all together in the old days in Morriston—now they all seem to live in worlds of their own. The inflexions of the voice, the continuous gestures and changing facial expressions, the moments of passionate emphasis and declamation, the careful pauses for the right word, the acting out of incidents recollected with intensity rather than in tranquillity: They can be remembered, not reproduced. And we give of course only a fragment, edited from various conversations and stripped, reluctantly, of the welter of details about his own relatives, of asides and digressions on the kinship and cultural behaviour of neighbouring families in Morriston, of staccato and irrelevant reminiscences, and repetitive comment.
Like most Welshmen, never using one word where ten will do, Mr Hughes will go on talking all day, and with enthusiasm, once he has properly warmed up and so long as he has a provocative 12 Families in a Mobile Society and sympathetic audience—to the pleasure, one must add, of the anthropologist, who is essentially a professional listener. Though necessarily brief, these are representative extracts giving the heart of the matter, if little of its form. The words of an old man, thoroughly embedded in his own traditional Welsh working-class culture built around the chapel and the neighbourhood.
They set the scene for the inquiry into family relationships which we conducted in Swansea. Directly expressed, and covertly in the undertones, are some of the main themes of our discussion. We are confronted at once with a wide variety of kinship situations, even in this single case, with a number of different forms of household composition, and with a number of separate households linked together through kinship ties in a complex web of contact and of reciprocal help and support in need or crisis, particularly as regards the care of the elderly.
The basic themes emerge with considerable clarity, and require little emphasis on our part. We can summarize them briefly now since they will, with others not directly involved here, form the subject matter of later chapters in this study. The Mam is dead, long live the Mam. Further, throughout the whole kinship network which emerges in outline form at least in these verbatim extracts, the stress appears to be on the links through women and on the roles of women.
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The relationships through women seem, to an important extent, to form the basic pattern into which the men concerned are fitted, called upon to provide economic support and authority as husbands and fathers; loyalty and affection, and help where needed as sons and grand-fathers. And it is mainly through these men, as workers and pro-viders, that the world of the family is linked externally to the total social and economic system. But if the evidence of this single case suggests a stress on the roles of women within the wider family, it equally indicates that the kinship structure is essentially bilateral, equal prominence being given so far as recognition of relationship is concerned to both sides of the family, to relations through the father equally with those through the mother.
This of course is a fact well known from common experience, though its precise significance and implications in terms of actual behaviour remains to be examined. In terms both of mutual affection and of frequent interaction, if not of co-residence, the effective family covers three generations, with links extending laterally from this basic grouping to collateral relatives— uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews, and so forth. In relation to the kinship structure in this particular case, this central threegeneration descent group stands out quite clearly as being of major importance.
Prominent among the other basic themes running through this case are the importance of physical proximity in the effective maintenance of relationship, the effect of the geographical range of marriage on the family cohesion, the use of alternative kin and inlaws to fill up gaps in close relationships caused by death or distance, and the considerable degree of individual variation and personal choice, depending among other things on personality factors, in the relations between kin. And here he is quite specific. The social and cultural change of the last seventy years or so, spanning his life experience from his childhood 14 Families in a Mobile Society in late nineteenth-century Morriston to his retirement in the middle of the twentieth century, has clearly had profound and pervasive effects on family behaviour.
He is talking of two radically different worlds, and describing in effect two distinct patterns of family behaviour.
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The first is that of his earlier years and is based fundamentally on the close clustering of kin in a limited locality, with a high degree of social and economic homogeneity and with close and complex ties of mutual co-operation between kin and neighbours. The second is that of his present family, a modified version of the former, continuing much of the older patterns but altogether looser in structure with a much wider scatter of relatives, and markedly heterogeneous in occupation and income and in social and cultural values.
The contrast is striking and he is well aware of it. His use of words is significant: There is over half a century of rapid social and cultural change between these two sets of statements. It is necessary to be precise about what is being said here. It is of fundamental importance in understanding contemporary family and kinship behaviour and we will be discussing it in detail later.
The contrast is not between the extended family on the one hand and on the isolated elementary family on the other. It is essentially between two types of extended family. But its structural form is basically different from that of the earlier family system which he describes with a good deal of pride and nostalgia. Formerly there was a local cluster of kin linked by continuous interaction and multiple social relationships from home to home, in the chapel, at work, in common adversity, at play. In a handful of sentences in these extracts from our long conversations with him on this subject, Mr Hughes gives a vivid picture of the Morriston of his youth—a picture of what might be termed, in contrast to the Mobile Society, the Cohesive Society: It was clearly much more 15 Families in a Mobile Society than a community of residence.
A community also of work with the men engaged in identical or similar occupations, a community of worship in the chapels, a community of basic cultural uniformities in language, in housing and material possessions, and in moral values. An exaggerated picture perhaps, seen in retrospect over half a century, with the conflicts and internal tensions omitted though there are fleeting references to these also in the remarks of this informant: Its cultural virtues have been the subject of frequent comment, pervaded often by a picturesque and nostalgic romanticism born of contemporary dissatisfactions.
These strengths appear, however, to be basically related to its economic homogeneities and congested housing and to its common privations and adversities. I mean, for example, the capacity for self-respect and selfsacrifice under adverse conditions, the sense of common need which makes individualistic ambition often suspect, the respect for the interdependence of different generations within a family and a neighbourhood. The family structure which matches this traditional close-knit community structure is indicated with clarity in the case we have been describing.
It is based on the close cohabitation of a multiplicity of kin and in-laws, covering the successive contemporaneous generations, and bound together in a network of many-sided social contacts, with each family home a centre of intersecting relationships. They have little in common, besides their elderly parents. In the place of the former essential homogeneity there is now heterogeneity: And the contemporary family structure in this particular case is basically modified, an adaptation of the older form to the realities of the current situation.
The extended family is clearly still very much in existence and still has a considerable practical and emotional importance for its members. The form is still there to a considerable extent, but little of the older spirit. The break-up of the natal home through the death of the mother will lead, he seems to suggest, to a disintegration of this loosely organized wider family, a disruption of what little cohesion it still possesses, and a fragmentation into isolated elementary families with few effective links to one another—though, we must add, each of these may well grow with the cycle of the generations into a separate extended family.
The social and cultural changes he is conscious of can be elaborated at length: There is a rich field of discussion here. Every informant is a window opening on to the social world we are examining. But to get an accurate perspective we need to identify the angle of vision. The detailed study of a single case can be extremely useful in opening up 17 Families in a Mobile Society lines of thought and inquiry, in raising the questions that need to be asked rather than in providing the answers—the most difficult problem of all research being to discover the right questions rather than the right answers.
This case has raised, in terms of actual behaviour, a number of central issues for the understanding of family and kinship behaviour in present-day Swansea. It is, however, an individual case, given by a particular informant of a particular economic and cultural background and in particular social circumstances. We need to ask how representative it is of all those in similar circumstances, and whether the behavioural patterns and attitudes which we discern in it vary significantly when we consider other cases which differ basically by social class and culture and economic condition. We need in short to examine a succession of cases, of as varied circumstances as possible, in order to decide what is common and general and what is special and idiosyncratic.
The viewpoint of the old, as here, gives us one perspective of kinship behaviour: The task of the sociologist in this field, as ever, is to relate these perspectives to one another and to set them within the framework of the social system of the society he is investigating.
With the help of this elderly Welshman from Morriston, we have at least begun this task so far as our inquiry in Swansea is concerned. We leave the consideration of the Hughes Family Morriston at this point to consider in a more general manner the major theme which has emerged, and which underlies everything we have to say about family behaviour in this book—the effects of social and cultural change on the structure of the extended family. Not surprisingly for sociological discussions, some of the obvious confusion can be traced to vagueness or to simple disagreements, not always readily apparent, about the meaning and usage of terms.
There is little difficulty so far as the term elementary family is concerned, though it has a bewildering number of aliases in the literature. Every individual except in certain rare and exceptional circumstances such as those of foundlings, for example becomes automatically the member 18 Families in a Mobile Society of an elementary family by virtue of birth. And every married individual belongs to a further elementary family, founded by the marriage, this time as husband, or wife, and parent.
There are no points of fact or theory involved in this change of terms as applied to the study of Western society; the Young and Willmott terms are, however, simpler and less easily confused, and we use them in this present study. Movement from a particular household clearly does not mean cessation of membership of a particular elementary family.
This is a simple but important point and we preserve this distinction when we come to consider the composition of households in Swansea in a later chapter. It is these continuing relationships between elementary families—three such families being involved in every marriage, the family of marriage founded by the marriage itself, and the families of origin of the husband and wife— which form the basis for the extensive ramification of kinship ties and for kinship and familial groupings wider than the individual elementary family. It is with the nature of these wider familial groupings, and particularly with the usage of the term extended family, that we enter the familiar jungle of terminological confusion and apparent contradiction.
An examination of the literature quickly produces a welter of contradictory statements and assumptions about the external relationships of elementary families in urban areas. We do not propose to undertake a lengthy critical examination of this profuse sociological literature or to engage in debate on the usage of terms. However, if we are to make a contribution to this general and important C discussion about the characteristics of 4 Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London, At one extreme there are those sociologists, mainly but certainly not exclusively American, who appear to take for granted the isolation of elementary families—seen as primary domestic groups—in towns and cities.
They either ignore or dismiss kin ties beyond this primary unit as being of little or, at best, marginal importance. This view, explicitly or implicitly, is extremely common, particularly in the American sociological literature. Ralph Linton in a famous essay on the family, discusses the breakdown of kin ties in the city: The economic and other influences that have affected family life in the city have tended to keep down the size of the extended family, leaving only the nuclear family of parents and children, with occasional other relatives.
Ruth Nanda Anshen, , pp. Stein and Cloward, , p. It waxes up to and through the adolescence of children and declines as the children marry and move. There can be little doubt that this is a view of the urban family which has passed into general acceptance through constant reiteration and, it must be added, through constant reinforcement both from particular sociological studies and from widespread personal experience. The break-up of the wider family in the city is a familiar theme of discourse. Some sociologists, notably Ralph Linton and Talcott Parsons, examining this proposition with greater theoretical rigour than is usually apparent, have argued that this disruption and isolation must necessarily occur in contemporary urban societies because the extended family system is in fundamental conflict with a modern industrial economy.
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Ralph Linton, in the essay we have already mentioned, relates this disruption of wider kin groupings directly to the predominant characteristics of the total economic system: The family of the future will be a direct outgrowth of present familial conditions and trends, and in order to predict its possible form it is necessary to have an understanding of the current situation.
The outstanding feature of this situation is the almost complete breakdown of the consanguine family as a functional unit. Although the Western European consanguine grouping has never dominated the conjugal one, its potentialities for function and its claims on the individual were much stronger even a hundred years ago than they are today. This breakdown seems to be directly correlated with the increased opportunities for both spatial and social mobility which have been created by the current technological revolution.
A strong consanguine family organization provides its members with a high degree of economic security, but it also imposes many obligations. Colloquially speaking, when a man can do better without relatives than with them, he will tend to ignore the ties of kinship. The unparalleled expansion of Western Europe and American economy in the past century, with the wealth of individual opportunity which it has produced, has struck at the very roots of consanguine family organization.
He goes on to argue that, because of stress on individual mobility, which is an inherent feature of the occupational and status systems of the total society, the isolated elementary family is the only family type which is functional in such a society. This is an important argument with a clearly enunciated hypothesis, to which we will return presently. Linton makes in this essay his well-known distinction between the conjugal family as spouses and offspring, and the consanguine family as a diffuse and almost unorganized group of blood relatives.
The first of these arguments has a growing number of adherents judging by the frequency with which it is beginning to appear in a variety of contexts. It has been ably expressed by Raymond Williams, a shrewd social spectator who sees most of the game: We think of the new housing estates, the new suburbs and the new towns as characteristic of the new Britain, and on the whole it is in these areas that Labour hopes are now most regularly disappointed. But in fact people of many different kinds live in these places, which also between themselves have important differences. Attention has been concentrated on the break-up of old community patterns, by such physical removal, but this needs discriminating description.
There is social variation, all the way from the estate still mainly serving a single works to the new town wholly mixed in origins and centres of work. There is also historical variation, from the first-generation estate in which social relations are still at the level of casual neighbourly contact, to the second-generation estate on which people have been born, grown up and married. The disruption of extended families noted in some removals is in itself a temporary phenomenon: We cannot be sure what will happen, but it would be rash to assume that all former patterns are permanently gone.
The old working-class communities grew, over a century, from a situation of removal and exposure fully comparable to the present phase. When the temporary and artificial nature of the newest communities has been allowed for, and when we have overcome the simple determinism of supposing that things whether houses or washing machines shape men, we shall perhaps be more cautious in assuming that there are wholly new permanent patterns and in particular that we know what these are.
We shall be examining the growth of Swansea from this point of view, and we can of course recall the case of Mr Hughes of Morriston which brings out this point quite clearly. Mr Hughes contrasts the clustering of kin in the Morriston of his youth, and the high degree of community 13 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, , pp. But if we go back one step to his parental generation we are at once in the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution in South Wales. His grandparents were agricultural workers in rural Carmarthenshire: Trace the genealogy of any elderly informant from the old industrial areas on the east side of Swansea famed a few decades ago for its concentration of thriving metallurgical industries, and in one or two generations you are back in the countryside amongst a rural peasantry.
Morriston and its neighbouring communities grew over more than half a century of rapid industrialization and urbanization. And as the memories of the removals and upheavals faded and a new residential stability emerged the familiar family patterns and wider kin groups were re-constructed in the new environment. But it took time, more than a single generation. Is this not what is happening now, it may be asked. We have emphasized some of these in our discussion of the Hughes Family earlier in this chapter, and we will be examining them in greater detail and with an accumulation of evidence from a variety of social circumstances in later chapters.
In many vital respects the social structure of the old industrial communities like Morriston was similar to that of the traditional rural areas from which the original migrants had come. The urban village was constructed on the model of the rural village. There were fundamental identities in the two social situations, notably geographical concentration and propinquity of kin, continuous homogeneity of occupation and of economic condition, a restricted range of marriage, cultural uniformities in religion and language and education, restricted opportunities of social advancement and physical mobility.
As Mr Hughes is well aware, the present situation differs fundamentally in its heterogeneities and diversifications within the family, and the essential basis would appear to have been lost for the reconstruction of family patterns according to the former model, even given an adequate framework of time and generation depth.
The analysis of Talcott Parsons and his central hypothesis of the 24 Families in a Mobile Society incompatibility of the extended family with the contemporary economic system is obviously of basic relevance here. The second challenge to the proposition asserting the isolation of the elementary family as the result of urbanization and industrialization has also a growing audience as the reports of recent sociological field studies, mainly in Britain, have become available.
It is being strongly led by the Institute of Community Studies, founded and directed by Dr Michael Young, whose publications have attracted wide attention both among sociologists and among those concerned with social planning and with the formulation and implications of social policy, particularly in relation to housing and to the social and economic condition of elderly people. This is particularly true of the trilogy14 on family life in Bethnal Green in the East End of London, published in and The first study examined kinship, both in Bethnal Green and in a new housing estate on the outskirts of London to which many Bethnal Green families had been moved; the second study was concerned specifically with the family relationships of old people in the same area of East London; and the third with the special family problems and relationships of widows.
Edward Shils, in a review of one of the publications of this Institute, has summarized the results of its field investigations of family behaviour: In a similar vein, Richard Titmuss introduces the first of the studies of Bethnal Green: Much of the nonsense that is written on the subject today does require challenging.
For it is indeed compounded of a curious mixture: Peter Marris, Widows and their Families, But, to their surprise and interest, the actual situation in this ancient working-class borough in the East End was very different: Thus prepared, we were surprised to discover that the wider family, far from having disappeared, was still very much alive in the middle of London. This finding seemed to us of much more interest than anything we had been led to expect, all the more so when it transpired that the absence of relatives seemed to be as significant on the estate as their presence in the borough.
We therefore decided, although we hit on it more or less accidentally, to make our main subject the wider family.
Essentially these studies direct attention to the important part extended family relationships play in the daily lives of the people of Bethnal Green: The emphasis is on the necessity of the extended family in its supportive role for the individual elementary families, and therefore on the destructive and deleterious effects on family organization of migration produced by public policies of urban decongestion, slum clearance and re-housing on distant estates.
Since one of our main purposes in this present study in Swansea is to compare our findings on these matters with those of the Bethnal Green studies, we 17 Young and Willmott, op. Families in a Mobile Society shall be considering these conclusions in detail in later chapters. For the moment we must note that in relation to the general sociological discussion about the characteristics of the urban family, the Bethnal Green studies, operating a simple contrast between the extended family Bethnal Green type on the one hand and the isolated elementary family Greenleigh housing estate type on the other, present a strong case for the continuation in urban areas, of a particular sociological character, of the extended family—though the evidence from their comparative investigation on the housing estate would appear to confirm the proposition that mobility leads to a decomposition of the kinship group.
He maintains that the Parsonian hypothesis tends to be valid only during periods of emerging industrialization.
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He carefully argues that extended family relationships with significant reciprocal aid and support can be maintained without geographical proximity and without a single authoritarian family head—the classical paterfamilias—exercising strict control over the extended family groupcovering three generations and a number of component elementary families.
Litwak sums up his own position as follows: The modified extended family differs from past extended families in that it does not require geographical propinquity, occupational nepotism, or integration, and there are no strict authority relations but equalitarian ones. Family relations differ from those of the isolated nuclear family in that significant aid is provided to nuclear families, although the aid has to do with standard of living housing, illness, leisure pursuits rather than occupational appointments or promotions.
This is the universe of discourse against which we must interpret our own findings. Whichever point of view has been expressed, there is no dearth of evidence in its support—though, it must be added, the evidence in favour of alternative arguments appears rarely to be considered, the final instance above being a notable exception. It is impossible to examine the literature and evidence in any detail without recognizing the necessity for an orderly synthesis of these apparently contradictory arguments. But there can equally be few who would not agree that the Institute has made a spectacular and important contribution to this discussion, qualifying the general proposition about the urban family in modern society.
Two points of major importance for our present study emerge from this brief canvass of the varying points of view that have been expressed. First, towns differ, and industrialism has a variety of characteristics— a simple point which is as important as it is obvious. The argument adopted depends essentially on the particular social and cultural conditions being considered. There is considerable variation of social system from one urban area to another this variation, as we see with Bethnal Green and will be seeing with Swansea, possibly occurring to a marked degree even within a single urban area.
We cannot assess 21 Eugene Litwak, op. As the total social system changes so we would expect to find concomitant change a family behaviour. With this in mind, we devote the two chapters which follow to a description of Swansea and to an examination of social class and cultural distinctions and to the trends of social change in Swansea, before turning to discuss family behaviour in this environment.
The problems of description and comparative statement would be much easier if sociologists could agree on the meaning and usage of terms. This is of course unlikely. A group may be described as a joint family when two or more lineally related kinsfolk of the same sex, their spouses and offspring, occupy a single homestead and are jointly subject to the same authority or single head. The term extended family should be used for the dispersed form corresponding to a joint family.
A family may also, although not occupying the same household with relatives, share so much of their daily lives that they and their relatives do in effect constitute one domestic unit…. We use the term extended family to apply as much to a family and relatives living together in this way as we do to a family and relatives who are occupying the same household all the time. Bell and Ezra F.
Bell and Vogel, , p. The emphasis is on a cluster of related elementary families, normally but not necessarily living together as a co-residential group, and essentially all under a single family head with authority in law. This is a familiar form of family organization in contemporary and ancient tribal and peasant societies.
It is clearly the family form that Parsons had in mind in his analysis of the incompatibility of the extended family with a modern industrial system. The third definition is an adaptation of this orthodox anthropological usage to meet the situation encountered by Townsend in Bethnal Green. He retains with modification the criterion of common residence, adds with emphasis an apparently precise measure of contact as a new defining feature, and omits without mention the basic characteristic of authority.
The fourth definition similarly omits reference to authority, retains the criterion of residence but adds a new condition: They do not discuss whether there are any other modified forms of the extended family because their elaborate definition, as it were, already precludes these. They are left in effect with only the concept of the isolated elementary family to oppose to their Bethnal Green-type extended family as this is variously defined.
On the one hand we can say that each of 30 Families in a Mobile Society these family forms is an extended family for different reasons based on the same definition—in the former case on grounds of clustering and common residence, in the latter on grounds of frequency of contact to the parental home—thus obscuring a fundamental variation in family structure, of which Mr Hughes at least is well aware.
The frequent visiting between households that this involves presumably means that Mr Hughes is, according to these definitions, a member of an extended family which only includes some of the children with which he is in regular contact. The elementary family in Sketty on the other side of Swansea is only seen on Saturdays, and the other married son and his family down in the docks have not been seen for some months. Then the children of this elderly couple, brothers and sisters and their spouses, are widely separated and meet irregularly and only at the parental house—and thus, by these definitions, the extended family from the point of view of any one of them cannot include their siblings.
The absurdities here are obvious and they illustrate the difficulties arising from apparent precision of definition. We need in fact to approach this problem differently, to use terms precisely where this precision is significant and yet with sufficient flexibility to reflect accurately the social reality we are describing.
The second definition quoted above, apparently vague at first sight, seems to us to be precisely what is needed here: In this sense it does not prejudice the analysis by giving a false and predetermined precision, and thus does not beg the questions that have to be answered by research. It does not involve confusing the 31 Families in a Mobile Society two quite separate concepts of household and family.
It directs attention to the complicated interplay of a variety of factors in family structure rather than on the emphasis in advance on certain factors at the expense of others. It enables us to observe in analysis modifications of extended family organization emerging under different social conditions, in the manner illustrated by Eugene Litwak in the Buffalo study to which we have referred.
We therefore intend adopting this definition of the extended family in this inquiry with a slight but important modification from that given by Bell and Vogel. We feel that the definition should obviously exclude such temporary groupings of relatives as assemble at weddings and funerals, for example, and have therefore re-phrased the definition as follows: Discussions of terminology can be extremely boring if they dwell on trivialities, and immensely irritating if they turn into arid pedantry.
We hope to have avoided these dangers in this particular discussion. This we seek to do. For the other, a Londoner by birth and upbringing, this was his first visit to Wales and an initial acquaintance with its distinctive manners and customs. Native and stranger, we formed at least a balanced team for this first reconnaissance of the family life of the urban Welsh.
Neither of us had any previous experience of social research in a modern industrial society of the scale and economic complexity of Swansea. In recent years there have been a number of fascinating studies of Welsh rural communities, but no previous examination of family behaviour in a major Welsh town In its original conception in the Social Science Department of the University College of Swansea, this study was seen as a direct extension, to a distant and different part of Britain, of the work of the Institute of Community Studies in the East End of London.
It was felt that the publications of this Institute offered an important challenge to current views on family life which, if confirmed, would influence social theory and point to the need for profound changes in social policy. The need for comparative investigation in a different part of the country from Bethnal Green, with different traditions, different industries and a different social history was obvious if the conclusions of these Bethnal Green studies were to be seen in a wider perspective and their adequacy and degree of universality assessed. Swansea was chosen, because of the interest of the Social Science Department there in this question and because this interest was supported by a most generous grant from the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust, as being a suitably contrasting urban area for this comparative investigation.
We began this study therefore with the problem of comparing our findings with those of the Bethnal Green studies as one of our given terms of reference though of course we were not limited solely to this comparison. It was originally envisaged that a considerable part of the study would be concerned with the social problem of old age. In the event we were unable to include all the results of our inquiries into this problem in the present work, and it is hoped that these will form the subject of another publication.
We received initially from the Institute of Community Studies most valuable help, based on their experience, with planning our inquiries and with the technical details of statistical sampling, schedule construction, the use of punched cards for the sorting and analysis of data, and so forth. This advice, and the prescription of comparison a central necessity for all sociological investigation with the Bethnal Green inquiries, heavily influenced the research design we eventually adopted and the fieldwork methods we used.
The responsibility for this, and for the outcome, rested of course entirely with us, and not in any sense earlier in this chapter, this valuable report makes little reference to the family relationships of the old—only ten brief paragraphs out of numbered paragraphs being devoted to this subject and then exclusively in terms of household composition. The methods used in any study depend of course on the problems chosen for examination, on the aims of the inquiry, on the development of thought and concept as the research proceeds, and essentially on the kind of environment in which the research is being conducted.
However advantageous it may be for comparative purpose, the simple translation of methods from Bethnal Green to Swansea presents serious difficulties. Swansea and Bethnal Green as two theatres for research are radically different, and this indeed was why Swansea was selected for this study. Swansea in area if not in population is indeed one of the largest County Boroughs in Britain.
It is impossible by the simple act of living there to develop the same total familiarity with Swansea as a whole as it would be to do this in Bethnal Green. Indeed we were constantly surprised to discover how little Swansea people knew of localities, other than their own, which were some distance away and markedly different in social character.
It was our intention in Swansea to use, so far as was practicable, anthropological techniques of inquiry in our study of family behaviour. Basically they are field techniques based on the village as the normal fieldwork situation: And we have become familiar by now—usually by inference from published studies rather than by detailed expositions of method—with the fieldwork methods normally used: