This paper should be entirely written by you and reflect your own thinking. Do not use GenAI for this assignment.
Soc. 111AC Changing Families Project Assignment 1: Family History and Profile
For this assignment you will write up a history and profile of a family that will focus on experiences of marriage, childbearing, gender relations and the division of family labor across a few generations. You are free to choose your own family (most students do!) or interview another young person about theirs. This could be another student in our class, or someone else that you know, but the person should be roughly around your same age. You will later draw upon this profile to think sociologically about connections between individual families, social structure and social change for the second assignment of the Changing Families Project, so keep that in mind.
For this assignment, focus on three generationsyour own, parents and grandparents. Decide the chronological order that you prefer for describing each generationwill you begin with the grandparents, follow with parents and end with your own generation or the reverse? Its up to you. For grandparents and parents, describe some aspects of what happened in their family life around marriage or cohabitation, divorce (if this happened, or break-up), childbearing, gender relationships and the household division of labor along with their social and economic circumstances. Did the grandparents get married? When and what were the circumstances? Where were they living? What was their story of childbearing? Can you say anything about whether they had their desired number of children? What do you know about their gender relations? How did they divide economic and domestic work? Were they happy together ? Did they stay together? What can you say about their race/ethnic backgrounds and social class? Did their economic circumstances change over time? While you do not need to answer every question above, you should try to summarize these different aspects of their lives. Please feel free to include anything that you think is significant that is not mentioned here.
For your generation (yourself, a sibling or a friend/fellow student) the discussion may be different. Most undergraduate students have not embarked on their own independent family life yet, so much of this discussion may be theoreticalit will focus on what you think might happen or are planning/hoping for in the future. Others may have concrete experiences to relate about childbearing, marriage, cohabitation and more. This should be clear in the way you write-up the discussion for the current generation. Again, address experiences of, or hopes and plans for marriage (or not) and romantic relationships, childbearing and gender relations along with some information about social and economic circumstances and other points you think are significant based on your career plans and family of origin.
Once you finish profiling each generation, make some observations about continuity and change for the family you have profiled. Given our class discussions about changes in family patterns over time, do you think they are generally following mainstream trends around marriage, childbearing, gendered divisions of labor, etc.? Why or why not? What factors outside of the family, such as race/ethnicity, education, immigration, religion or others do you think are important for understanding this family’s story over time? Support your discussion with information from relevant readings when appropriate. Please close the paper with a discussion that addresses your experience finding out this information, and what stood out to you the most from writing up this family profile and history.
The paper should be 5-7 pages long in 12-point font and double-spaced. You can list the names of any people you spoke with as references, if that applies to your paper.
Include a reference page if you cite class materials or other sources. The reference page is not part of the page limit.
, also posted in the “course documents” folder in “Files”.
Should I choose my own family?
The majority of students choose to profile their own family. However, if you are not sure, here are some points to think about.
- Your own family experiencesgenerally positive or negative? If you have painful family experiences in your past, it may be difficult to write about them. For the Changing Families Project, the specific family, or what happened in it, is not particularly important– what is important is that you have a profile and history that considers change and continuity in family patterns over time, and information that you can use for the second assignment. That can be your family, or it can just as easily be someone elses. On the other hand, this project can be a way for students to learn more about their own family and think about their family experiences in a new way. Many students report having positive experiences talking with parents and grandparents about their family experiences in preparation for this assignment.
- Ability to find out informationIt is not uncommon for students to lack knowledge of some of the information we are asking you to report in the family histories. If you dont know enough, can you talk with a family member or someone else who can fill in some details? If you are profiling someone elses family, do they have enough information about their family for you to be able to write-up a strong profile and history? If they dont, are they willing to find out more information for you?
- Are you an international student? Because this is an American Cultures class, our focus on family patterns and changes over time and how they are related to other institutions is based on trends for the United States. In the second assignment, you will need to connect some of the specific experiences of the family you profile in this paper with broader trends for U.S. families across different time periods. Some students think that this may be easier to do with families with some history in the U.S., but in my experience this really does not matter.
- Objectivity and InterestThe second assignment asks you to take an objective and analytical stance when thinking about specific family experiences. You may find this more difficult to do with your own family. It can also be an interesting experience to swap family stories with a fellow student. All family stories are interesting in their own ways.