1. The Meaning of Marriage and the Family Key Terms
Chapter 1
The Meaning of Marriage and the Family Key Terms

2. Affiliated kin Unrelated individuals who feel and are treated as if they were relatives.
Family Family may be defined as one or more adults related by blood, marriage, or affiliation who cooperate economically, who may share a common dwelling, and who may rear children.

3. Household A household consists of one or more people—everyone living in a housing unit makes up a household.
Clan A group of related families, is regarded as the fundamental family unit.

4. Nuclear family A family consisting of mother, father, and children.
Traditional family A mostly middle-class version of the nuclear family in which women’s primary roles are wife and mother and men’s primary roles are husband and breadwinner.

5. Marriage A legally recognized union between two people, generally a man and a woman, in which they are united sexually, cooperate economically, and may give birth to, adopt, or rear children.

6. Monogamy The practice of having only one spouse at one time.
Polygamy The practice of having more than one wife or husband.

7. Modified Polygamy or Serial Monogamy A practice in which one person may have several spouses over his or her lifetime although no more than one at any given time.

8. Polygyny Having two or more wives.
Polyandry Having two or more husbands.

9. Socialization Shaping individual behavior to conform to cultural or social norms.

10. Family of procreation The common term for the family we form through marriage and childbearing.
Family of cohabitation The family we form through living or cohabiting with another person, whether we are married or unmarried.

11. Family of orientation The family in which we grow up, the family that orients us to the world. The family of orientation may change over time if the marital status of our parents changes.
Extended family Consists not only of the cohabiting couple and their children but also of other relatives, especially in-laws, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins.

12. Kinship systems The social organization of the family
Kinship systems The social organization of the family. It is based on the reciprocal rights and obligations of the different family members, such as those between parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, and mothers-in-law and sons-in-law.
Conjugal relationship Family relationships created through marriage. (The word conjugal is derived from the Latin conjungere, meaning“to join together.”)

13. Consanguineous relationship Relationships created through biological (blood) ties—that is, through birth.
Spirit marriage A marriage arranged by two families whose son and daughter died unmarried.

14. Conservatives To conservatives, cultural values have shifted away from individual self-sacrifice toward self fulfillment. This shift in values is seen as an important factor in changes in family life that occurred in the last three or four decades of the twentieth century. Conservatives recommend social policies to reverse or reduce the extent of such changes.

15. Liberals Liberals tend to believe that the changes in family patterns are just that—changes, not signs of familial decline. The liberal position also portrays these changing family patterns as products of and adaptations to wider social and economic changes rather than a shift in cultural values.

16. Centrists Share aspects of both conservative and liberal positions
Centrists Share aspects of both conservative and liberal positions. Like conservatives, they believe some familial changes have had negative consequences. Like liberals they identify wider social changes as major determinants of the changes in family life, but they assert greater emphasis than liberals do on the importance of cultural values.