Family Forms and Family Diversity
What Is a Family?
There is no single, universally agreed definition of a family in sociology. Rather than adopting one definition as correct, sociologists study the variety of household and kinship arrangements that people live in and the social meanings attached to them. The UK is home to a range of family diversity — different family forms that have become increasingly common since the mid-twentieth century. Understanding each form factually, without privileging one as “normal”, is a key sociological skill.
Major Family Forms in the UK
The following family forms are identified and studied by sociologists:
- Nuclear family: two parents and their dependent children living together as a self-contained unit. Functionalists such as Parsons argued this is the most efficient family form for modern industrial society.
- Extended family: a family network that extends beyond the nuclear unit to include grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Extended families may be vertically extended (three or more generations) or horizontally extended (relatives of the same generation).
- Reconstituted family: also called a blended family, formed when two adults — at least one of whom has children from a previous relationship — form a new household together. Reconstituted families have grown in number as divorce rates have risen and remarriage or repartnering has become more common.
- Lone parent family: one parent living with and responsible for dependent children. ONS data shows that around one in four families with dependent children in the UK is a lone parent family. The majority of lone parents are women.
- Single sex (same-sex) family: a family in which both parents are of the same sex, including same-sex couples raising children. The Civil Partnership Act 2004 and Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 gave same-sex couples in the UK formal legal recognition.
- Cohabiting family: a couple (same-sex or different-sex) living together without being married or in a civil partnership, who may or may not have children. Cohabitation has grown significantly in the UK since the 1970s.
The AQA specification identifies five family forms: nuclear, extended, reconstituted, lone parent and single sex. Each describes a different household arrangement. Sociologists study all of them as legitimate family forms without privileging one as the correct or normal version.
Global Family Forms
The spec notes that family forms differ not only within the UK but within a global context. Key examples include:
- Kibbutz: a collective settlement in which property and sometimes child rearing are shared among the community as a whole. The kibbutz challenged the assumption that child rearing is always a private family function.
- Polygamy: marriage to more than one spouse simultaneously. Polygyny (one man, multiple wives) is practised in some societies; polyandry (one woman, multiple husbands) is rare. Both are illegal in the UK.
The Rapoports: Five Types of Family Diversity
Rhona and Robert Rapoport argued that British society is characterised by diversity rather than a single dominant family form. Rather than simply counting different family structures, they identified five distinct dimensions of family diversity in their 1982 analysis:
- Organisational diversity: differences in the way families divide paid and unpaid work. For example, dual-career families versus families with a traditional breadwinner-homemaker split.
- Cultural diversity: differences related to ethnicity and religion. For example, South Asian families in the UK may have stronger extended kinship networks than White British families; Muslim, Hindu or Jewish families may organise family life differently in relation to gender roles and marriage practices.
- Social class diversity: working-class and middle-class families differ in income, housing, parenting styles and the opportunities available to children.
- Life cycle diversity: family structure changes across an individual’s life — a young childless couple, a family with young children, an empty nest family and a widowed individual are all at different life cycle stages.
- Cohort diversity: people born in different generations have experienced different historical conditions — attitudes to divorce, cohabitation and same-sex partnerships differ markedly between older and younger cohorts.
Not all sociologists regard the growth of family diversity as equally welcome. The New Right, associated with sociologists such as Charles Murray, views the growth of lone parent families and cohabitation with concern, arguing that the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family is linked to a range of social problems including poverty, crime and educational underachievement. Murray argued that lone parent households contribute to a dependency culture and an “underclass”.
Feminist sociologists, by contrast, tend to view the growth of family diversity as reflecting women’s greater economic independence and freedom to leave unhappy marriages and partnerships. From a feminist perspective, the decline of the traditional nuclear family represents progress rather than crisis. Postmodernist sociologists argue that diversity and individual choice are defining features of contemporary life and that no single family form can be presented as superior to others.
The Rapoports (1982) identified five types of family diversity in Britain: organisational, cultural, social class, life cycle and cohort. These show that the family is not a single fixed institution but varies across time, culture and circumstance.
Students sometimes write that “the nuclear family is dying out.” This is an overstatement. ONS data consistently shows that the nuclear family (married or cohabiting couple with dependent children) remains the most common family form in the UK. What has changed is that other family forms have grown in proportion — particularly lone parent families and cohabiting couples. The sociological point is not that the nuclear family has disappeared but that it is no longer the only family form encountered by the majority of the population. The Rapoports’ five types of diversity capture the complexity better than a simple “nuclear family is declining” claim.