Changes in Family Roles

GCSE Sociology

CHANGES IN ROLES WITHIN THE FAMILY

Content Page

Page 1 – Title Page

Page 2 – Content Page

Page 3 to 4 – Chapter one Introduction

Page 4 to 5 – Chapter two Methodology

Page 5-ds – Chapter three Content and Analysis

Page 5 to 6 – Chapter three Content

Page 6 to 11 – Chapter three Analysis

Page 11 to 13– Chapter four Conclusion

Page 13 to – Chapter four Evaluation

Page asldk – Chapter five Appendix

Chapter one Introduction

In this coursework I will be looking at how roles within the family have changed and the effect this has had on family members as well as the society and values of the family in post modern society. The family is very important institution in our society and therefore its changes must have affected it.

Having done some work on the family already, I have found that there are a lot of factors that could have changed the traditional institution of the family. Roles taken on by each individual of the family could be one of them.

My aims for this project include: Firstly, indentifying the traditional ideas of men and women within in the family and weather they have changed. Secondarily, I will consider the extended family and their role within the family. Thirdly, I will investigate how and why women’s roles within the family have changed. Finally, I will explore what impact has the changes in family roles had on the structure of the family.

The reason this area is of sociological importance, and these are suitable aims because it is important to identify the roles of the main members of the family in order to see how they have changed. Also, it is important to study these changes to see how they have impacted on members of the family and the society. Additionally, it is important because from investigating these changes we can see whether they are breaking the family structure or weather it is better for the society.

The New Right, like Valerie Riches, believes that changes within the family are breaking the family and therefore do not think these changes should be taking place. They blame the deviations from the traditional family, for many families breaking down in our day and age. They also believe that the traditional family was crucial in establishing stability in society.

Moreover, the area I chose to study is of sociological importance because the family plays a big part in society. Mrs Thatcher and the functionalist’s believe that the family is the corner stone of society which goes to say that it is fundamental.

To carry out my project, I researched past sociologists who have done some work on the family, and I found that Jacqueline Scott has done some research on family roles and the female role in particular so any of her views will help shape my conclusion. However, her views may be biased in some ways. Talcott Parsons and George Peter Murdock have also studied this area, looking at the functions of the family. In contrast to their work, Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard have studied the Feminist perspective on the family and roles relating to gender roles. Ann Oakley studied the way gender affected labour and roles. Their findings may be biased to the feminine side but gives a clear insight on the roles from a woman’s point of view. Also, I used the works of Young and Willmort and their functionalist view on the way the family roles have changed over the years.

Chapter two Methodology

In order to carry out my investigation into the changes of roles within the family, I will use a variety of sources. These include secondary sources as well as primary sources. My primary sources consist of interviews and questionnaires. The secondary sources contain information from academic books and internet resources.

Using the primary sources, the interview and the questionnaire, I will be able to obtain a lot of information on the topic which will help me draw a better conclusion. Primary sources are sources collected by myself; they only exist because I have collected the information. Primary sources are usually surveys or observations. I chose to do the surveys as I found them easier and less time consuming. Observations are however very good as they provide a much deeper insight in the area studied. Despite this, I chose the surveying method; the observation allows only a small group to be studied which will make it very difficult to come to a fair generalised conclusion. I therefore chose the interview method which I felt was less time consuming, but at the same time still informative enough for my research to be successful. I used an unstructured interview, which means the questions of the interview were not pre coded. This means the questions allowed the respondents to freely express themselves and I will be able to trigger discussion or ask new questions. A problem with an interview is that, the way I, as an interviewer, behave and ask the questions I am interested in may influence the respondent’s opinions or answers. This will occur in the results being inaccurate, I will therefore take this into account when analysing my data. In addition, an interview is very time consuming and only allows a small number of the population to be surveyed, this means that a generalisation cannot be made accurately. Also, another disadvantage of an interview is the fact that the interviewer can never be sure of whether or not the respondent is answering honestly, saying what he or she truly believes or the way they really do behave in society. In my case, many women may be embarrassed to say that they are the ones doing all the work around the house because this is no longer a common thing in Britain today. Despite all these disadvantages however, there are many advantages to an interview. An interview will allow me to get as much information as I need for my investigation on the roles on the family, where as with any other type of survey, such as a questionnaire, the information I would have received would have been limited. The best thing about an interview is that if the respondent cannot understand the question, you can reword it for them or comfortably explaining what the question is asking.

Therefore, in order to collect all the information I want I will be using interviews as my primary data. The way I will go about this is, I will list down what I want to find out in relation to my aims, and structure some questions that I definitely want to ask. Afterwards, in the interview if any other questions arise I will make sure I get them answered. I will interview three people from three different generations and the reason I will do this is because I will be using comparative sociology. Comparative sociology is sociology research whereby two or more things are being compared. I chose to do this because I felt it was very good especially for my first role to identify whether the roles within the family changed. The reason this was good was because I could ask the three different respondents what their individual role in the house is, I would then compare their answer and see whether it has changed or not.

For my secondary data, I will mainly use two books, one of which is called “Sociology Themes and Perspective” by Haralambos and Holborn and “An Introduction to Sociology” by Ken Brown. In these books, I will study the family sections and pick out anything that relates to my aims for this investigation. I will at the Functionalist view on the family and the changes it has gone through as well as feminists view and such. Secondary data is very easily obtained and is not time consuming as well. Secondary data means data that has already been collected, unlike primary data, I as the researcher, did not collect the original data myself. Secondary data is very useful because most of it is done by sociologists and therefore it can be reliable, however, sometimes the data may be outdated which may cause alterations in my final conclusion. Also, the data collected may not be fully representative, for example, for my topic, a research may be done to find out how many women work. If this research is carried out in only one specific area, the results will not be representative of the whole population and therefore when looking at secondary data, care must be taken for things like where and when the data was collected.

Chapter Three Content and Analysis

Content

This is a preview of the whole essay

Chapter Three Content and Analysis

Content

In relation to my first and third aims, “indentifying the traditional ideals of men and women within in the family and weather they have changed” and “I will investigate how and why women’s roles within the family have changed”, I interviewed different people of different generations in order to compare the results and indentify if there are any changes. This is called comparative sociology; comparative sociology involves comparisons of different things. In this case it will involve comparisons of three different generation’s views on the changes within the family. The comparative method is only based on analysis done within society, real cases rather than cases speculated by me. The interviews I carried out were very similar in terms of the questions asked, reason being, I was comparing the responses and therefore I needed to ask the same questions in order to be able to compare them and come to a conclusion on this topic. I used an unstructured interview because I felt it would give me a more in depth information. Also, I chose not to research this by using a questionnaire because I did not believe that would give me enough information for me to be able to draw a reasonable conclusion from.

In addition, I used some secondary sources in order to obtain more information on my subject. These included some research into other investigations done by other sociologist on my topic. An A Level book by the name of, “Sociology Themes and Perspectives” by Haralambos and Holborn, presented the work of Young and Willmott on their belief of the symmetrical family. They were Functionalists and therefore I decided to also study their view on the changes taking place in the family. I gathered a lot of useful information from this. In addition, the book provided me with information on the works of Friedrich Engels and the “Evolution of the family”

In relation to my second aim, which reads “I will consider the extended family and their role within the family”, I carried out some research on the internet. I posted a question on “Yahoo Answers” which quoted “Do you believe there is still a role for the extended family in the 21st century?” From this online blog, I gathered a lot of information on what people believed the role of the extended family was in the past and how it has changed now. Also, relating to this aim, I researched investigations done on the extended family from the “Sociology Themes and Perspectives” book by Haralambos and Holborn and also, “An introduction to Sociology” by Ken Brown. They provided useful information on the extended family and their altered role within the family due to modifications within the original structure.

In relation to my final aim, “I will explore what impacts have the changes in family roles had on the structure of the family” I carried out some research into how the structure of the family has changed and looked at statistics from the government which I found on the internet.

The reason I used primary sources was because I felt not all the secondary sources were entirely relevant to my topic. Collecting my own data meant that it would be specific to my topic. Despite this, when collecting my primary data I found that it took up a lot of my time which means it is very time consuming. Also, finding people to survey could also take a long time, and extra care had to be taken with the choice of words, this was also the case for the online blog.

My secondary sources were very useful in my investigation, they provided me with many relevant points on my topic and it was very easily obtained. The secondary source which I used most was the “Sociology Themes and Perspectives” book. This was the fourth edition of the book and it was published in 1995. The problem with this is that, being published in 1995, some of the researches done by sociologists at the time may be outdated and therefore not very reliable for our society now. Also, with the book being published in 1995, it means that recent research is not included in the book. The second piece of secondary data I used was another book I used, “An Introduction to Sociology” by Ken Brown. This was published in 1998 and is therefore more reliable in terms of outdated text issues.

Analysis

The interview proved very informative and it related to my first aim very well (“indentifying the traditional ideals of men and women within in the family and weather they have changed”). The interviews showed that the roles of women and men within the married family have changed due to different reasons. The first person I interviewed, who was my grandmother, was the eldest of the three women I had interviewed. She stated her role as a woman in the family as “taking care of my children, cooking, out shopping for food and other necessities and just around the house in general”. She also said she did not have a job until her husband had passed away, and when asked if she found it hard to get one, she stated that women did not get jobs in her young days and therefore she found it more difficult than she would have if it was our society now. This shows that women were somewhat suppressed in her days, and this may have impacted on the way women were also seen in the family because if they were not seen as capable enough to take on jobs, men had a reason to keep them at home doing all the housework. This relates back to my first aim, which states that I will identify the traditional ideals of women. Also, in order to identify the traditional ideal for men, I asked my grandmother what her husband’s role was, she answered: “his chores around the house were limited although he did help cook if he had any free time. Most of the time he was away working, while at home he was exhausted from all the work and therefore liked to relax.” This answer clearly shows that men were expected mostly to go to work and relax while at home. However, the fact that she mentioned he helped cook sometimes when he had free time suggests that perhaps men were not all about suppressing the woman and making her do all the work. Despite this, this may different from family to family and the mentality of each person. In relation to the second half of my first aim which referred to identifying whether these roles have changed, the interview with the second and last woman proves that roles have changed. In the interview with the second woman, who was my mother, she was also asked to describe her roles around the house as well as her husband’s. She answered “we share chores in the house, so whoever gets home from work first cooks, and whoever has free time will clean up the house... things that need to be done around the house are shared. I have no specific job within our household and neither does he.” This shows that my mother’s roles are different from those that my grandmother had. To further prove the change in roles within the family, I asked the third lady, who was younger, aged 20, what her roles are around the house and also her boyfriend’s with whom she shared an apartment. She answered “We tend to share most of our chores around the house, I don’t have a specific chore and neither does he, we pretty much share everything.” Her response shows again that the roles have changed around the house, perhaps not so much from my mother because they had similar answers, but definitely from my grandmother’s roles. This interview therefore supports my first aim which required me to identify the traditional ideals of women and men, and whether they have changed. It is clear from the responses of the three women that the traditional role was for women to stay at home and do the entire house work, and for men to go to work and basically be the provider of the family. From the response of the young woman and my mother who is thirty nine, we can see that these roles have changed, the main priority of the woman within the house no longer being to take care of the house. Women now have jobs and generally share their chores with their husbands or long term partner. The interview also helped slightly answer my third aim, which read: “I will investigate how and why women’s roles within the family have changed”. From the interview, I have found out that women’s roles changed from having to be a dedicated housewife, to being able to go to work, and sharing domestic work with their husbands. The change, as my last respondent answered, could have been due to the fact that women have realised the way they were living was not fair.

For my secondary data, as I’ve stated, I used “Sociology Themes and Perspectives” by Haralambos and Holborn. A particular chapter in this book related to my first aim fully, the chapter was about the symmetrical family, Young and Willmott’s theory about a symmetrical family. A symmetrical family is whereby everything in the family is shared equally between the two partners.

Their research shows the different stages the family had undergone, showing their changes, the main change in the roles as they become more and more shared around the house as the husband is more involved with the bringing up of the children and women now getting jobs. Young and Willmott’s research shows that partners “share their work; share their time.” This relates to my first aim about the changes in roles taking place. This shows that the roles had taken a major turn, as both partners are identified as having equal roles in the house now. Equal chores means that the husband is now more involved with the bringing up of the children, the husband does house work around the house. For the woman, this means she now has a job as well as her house duties just like her husband does. They are now both on equal grounds. According to Young and Willmott’s research, the partners now are both involved in any decision making and they both work together to keep the family stable. Young and Willmott have also come to a conclusion as to why the family has turned symmetrical. They believe that kinships are now breaking up, the wife not having her mother over to help as much due to changes in the Welfare state which have made it easier for each family to support itself. Therefore the need of kinships is no longer vital. In addition to this, job and career opportunity for women rose, and men were now forced to start taking more part in the family as women were not always around anymore. Also, a decrease in the amount of children per family has also had a major impact on the symmetrical change of the family because this has given women more opportunity to work. Now that both the husband and the wife work in the house, they are forced to share financial responsibility and so the family grows stronger together and more symmetrical. This research by Willmott and Young was done when they were both alive which was a while back. Considering the family is still going through a lot of changes and very quickly, we may be able to say that at the time this research was done, these may have been reasons for symmetry in the family, and the family may have become more symmetrical. However, it could be argued that even though this relates to the first aim about how the roles have changed within the family and why and also answers it quite clearly, it may be outdated because in our society today, there may be other reasons for these changes, or even there may be other changes within the family. This relates to my third aim as it identifies how the role of women has changed.

In addition to this, and in relation to my second aim about the extended family and their role within the family, I collected some primary sources which helped me to make a better conclusion. The primary data I collected, was obtained through the internet, I posted a blog with the question “Do you believe there is still a role for the extended family in the 21st century?” A lot of people answered to this blog, and overall many said that the extended family does not play such a major part in the family anymore. One person said “the role that the extended family plays depends entirely on the individual family” also someone else had said “the extended family still plays the same role depending on where in the world you are, and the culture of your country.” These mean that these people believe the extended family plays its normal role in society; however they believe that these roles are kept depending on the culture of the family and also the way the family sees the importance of their extended family. In spite of this, some said that they believe the extended family no longer has the same role within the family. They stated that the role of the extended family is still there to certain extent, and even though the extended family is not as involved as it used to be, it still plays some parts, and gets frequent visits. It still babysits for children if needed and helps out as much as it can. Also, they believe this is because there are other ways that they can now keep in touch with each other such as telephone calls and emails. Overall, from the responses to this blog, I can see that many people believe the extended family still has a role within the family, however small, but this role is played depending on each individual family, their background and beliefs and their culture in general.

Using my secondary data I have collected on this topic, I can see that the extended family has gone through some changes. The secondary information I have is from two books. These are, “Themes and Perspectives” by Haralambos and Holborn and “An Introduction to Sociology” by Ken Brown. The books state indentify the “classic” extended family as being made up of several nuclear families “joined together”. It also states that it was mainly used for many nuclear families which lived together. The “An Introduction to Sociology” by Ken Brown book, also recognised the “modified” extended family. They describe this family as nuclear families which are related living apart, perhaps geographically. However they still maintain contact and support each other through visiting or using the phone to keep in contact. The book also states “this is probably the most common family arrangement in Britain today.” These statements made about the original and modified extended family show that a lot of changes have gone on with the extended family. For one, they no longer live with each other in the “modified” extended family; this had obviously had an impact on the amount of help they get from each other, with many of them living very far away geographically. The separation could be due to anything, especially the fact that the single nuclear family had become closer, but also due to the fact that people have started moving around more which may have caused many families to separate. In relation to my second aim, this information supports this aim. It identifies the roles of the extended family both before and in present time. It shows that the role of the extended family was originally to help the family in many ways by living with each other in any way possible. However, it has now changed, due to the fact that the extended family and normal families no longer live together. Despite this, the extended family and the nuclear family to which it is joined with still try to help each other where possible.

During my research, I have also collected some information, mainly secondary, on the structure of the family. This directly relates to my final aim, which reads “I will explore what impacts have the changes in family roles had on the structure of the family.” The information was from an internet source which I found while I was doing my research. It provided graphs to show changes in the structure of the family. One of the graphs that I collected showed the changes in marital status from 1972 to 2006. From the graph a lot of things can be recognised.

This graph shows that there was an increase on the people who are now not married as well as the people divorcing. This increase has had a lot of influences on the way the family is structured. As can be seen from this graph, many people do not marry and many get divorced. This would mean that if children are still present at the time of divorce, the family structure would go from a nuclear family to a lone parent family or a reconstituted family whereby the child would live with one of their parents and their new wife/husband or girlfriend/boyfriend.

From this graph it is clear that al family structures have changed from 1970. They have all changed in numbers; this could be taken to mean that there is still balance in the structure. However, the nuclear family has dropped dramatically in number, with this, the rest of the structures have risen above what they once were in 1970. We can see from this that there are now many single families and other family structures which include reconstituted families and possibly empty shell families. Also, these could include the families having children outside of marriage. Overall, this graph shows how the changes in roles, such as the woman becoming somewhat equal to the man in the family, have altered the structure of the family. The nuclear family has dropped in number and the other families as well as singles have decreased. Perhaps this was due to the fact that women now took more control, not accepting everything that was thrown at them. Also they were now more educated, all reasons for them to have more confidence and set out on their own, divorcing and even supporting a family on their own. In addition, the number for families that were married without any children had decreased somewhat but not very much. This could be due to natural reasons, such as infertility, but also due to personal reasons, perhaps women now being more educated had more say in whether they wanted a child or not which had caused this number to stay somewhat the same.

Chapter Four Conclusion and Evaluation

Conclusion

From the investigation I have done on the family and the changes it has gone through, I collected enough data to be able to relate to my aims and therefore fully complete the investigation.

My primary data was very helpful, from the interviews I collected and the blog I posted, I collected a lot of relevant information. From the three interviews I compared I found that many of the original roles that both the wife and the husband played in the family have changed majorly. The woman now plays a more important place and is treated more equally. She now has a job, and not forced to stay in the house. On the other hand, the husband is more involved in his children’s growing up and he now also pays more attention to his wife, and involving her in important decisions to do with their household and general life. They both appear to now share household chores, unlike in the past when that was strictly the wife’s job. In addition to this information, from the blog I posted I found that many people believe that the extended family still plays its role within the family to some extent. Even though the extended family does not live with the nuclear family anymore, they still do try to help the family as best they can. Also it was identified that the extended family plays its role depending on the culture of the family as well as the individual family’s values and beliefs.

My secondary data also proved to be very helpful; it answered most of my aims and helped make a better conclusion. Most of my secondary sources came from sociology books, the rest from the internet. The information I collected from academic books was very helpful.

I will state each of my aims and explain how they have been answered by either the secondary sources or the primary sources.

“Indentifying the traditional ideas of men and women within in the family and whether they have changed.”

This aim was answered mainly by the three interviews I carried out and compared. From them I found that the role of women has changed majorly within the family. In conclusion, men and women have fairly equal roles and involvement within the family in our day and age. Their traditional roles were basic; the husband was expected to bring money into the house while the wife was expected to do all the house works, including taking care of the children.

“I will consider the extended family and their role within the family.”

This second aim of my investigation, was answered using my primary sources as well, the blog I posted on “Yahoo” proved very useful. I found out that the extended family used to play a major role within the traditional family as they used to live together; they were able to offer a lot of help to the main family. Nowadays however, according to the information I collected, the extended plays its roles within the family depending on the individual family beliefs and also on the culture of the family. In addition to this, the secondary sources I collected on this, back up the fact that the traditional roles of the extended family have changed as they now live further apart or may not keep in contact anymore for various reasons.

“I will investigate how and why women’s roles within the family have changed.”

This aim was answered by the secondary sources collected on the symmetrical family, reason being, the idea of the symmetrical family shows that women’s roles have taken a turn. Women now have a voice in the family and they are now permitted to have a job. Also, the reasons for this are that women started getting educated at which point, they were able to get jobs or start careers which put them on the same level as men. Also, the career or job that women could get into now that they were educated meant that they were earning for themselves and therefore no longer depending on men. This caused women to become more independent and their role within the family changed.

“I will explore what impact has the changes in family roles had on the structure of the family.”

To answer this aim I used some internet sources, I collected some graphs from a government source and explained what they showed. I interpreted the data and in conclusion, found that for example the single parent family has increased which suggests a change in the structure of the family. Also, I found that the number of people who do not marry is also increasing which again will have an impact on the family structure. I believe that these changes have been caused due to the changes in roles. For example, women are now more educated and therefore will not hesitate to divorce if they are not treated with respect, this will perhaps cause single parent families. In addition, both females and males may be scared of ending in divorce and will not marry.

Evaluation

Overall, the investigation went fairly well, however there were both ups and downs in my methods of choice.

For collecting my information in terms of primary data, I used interviews and an internet blog. I believe the interviews were very useful and they allowed me to use comparative sociology which was very good for my project because I was trying to mostly identify change. For this reason, comparing seemed the best thing to do. However, this proved useful for only some areas and looking back to how I might have done anything differently, I realise I could have taken the opportunity while interviewing to gather much more information than I have done. Instead of doing this, I focused only on the change of roles as that was what I was going to compare. Also, because of the people I chose to interview were not all from different cultures, their answers cannot be representative of all the different cultures within society. Despite this, the interviews were a great help when answering my first aim. In addition, the second way in which I collected my primary data was through an internet blog. By doing this, I was sure to get a variety of people as many different people search the web, however I also got some irrelevant, however I did not include these in my results or interpreted them in any way and therefore they did not affect my final conclusions. Overall, my primary data was very useful, however, for my project, a questionnaire would have been ideal; therefore if given the chance to do this again I would carry out an interview.

For my secondary data I mostly used two sociology books, “An Introduction To Sociology” by Ken Brown and “Sociology Themes and Perspective” by Haralambos and Holborn. These book were very helpful as well as reliable, however the information within them could be outdated or not representative. Apart from this, the books were very useful for my project because they included a lot of information on the family which was very helpful.

Chapter Five Appendix

The link to the blog I posted about the extended family.

Interview I carried out

Interview with my grandmother In relation to my first and third aims, “indentifying the traditional ideals of men and women within in the family and weather they have changed” and “I will investigate how and why women’s roles within the family have changed”, I interviewed different people of different generations in order to compare the results and indentify if there are any changes.

Unstructured interview

Grandmother:

Me: Hello, I am doing my Sociology coursework investigation on what changes there have been in the family roles for men and women. I will ask you some questions and you can answer as fully as you would like, but as much detail as possible. Is that alright?

Respondent: Yes that’s fine.

Me: Okay, I will start by asking you what your typical job in the house was and what your husband’s usual routine or job around was.

Respondent: Well, my daily routine involved taking care of my children, cooking, out shopping for food and other necessities and just around the house in general. I did not get a job until after your granddad passed away, we had n o money and so I had to get a job. While alive, his chores around the house were limited although he did help cook if he had any free time. Most of the time he was away working, while at home he was exhausted from all the work and therefore liked to relax.

Me: And was it hard for you to get a job?

Respondent: I found it a little bit hard to get a job because not many women had jobs at the time and so not many companies, shops or factories offered any jobs for women. I had however my cousin who owned a little corner shop and he offered me a job to work there.

Me: Oh, you were lucky! So you say women did not get jobs back then, how did you and your female friends feel about this?

Respondent: We were used to this system, we grew up in it and so no it did not bother us at all. We grew up like this so for us it was entirely normal.

Me: Sounds fair. So why do you think this was the case? Women having to stay at home while men worked?

Respondent: For that reason exactly, men had to work. Most work was out of town and so they were away for long periods of time which meant it was us who had to take care of the children and just around the house. Also, most work was limited to only men because it involved heavy lifting and men type jobs in general.

Me: Okay, thank you very much for you time.

Respondent: No problem, glad to help hope your coursework goes well!

Mother:

Respondent: Yes, ask away.

Me: Thank you, what is your role within the family and what if dad’s role within the family?

Respondent: Well as you know, we share chores in the house, so whoever gets home from work first cooks, and whoever has free time will clean up the house and take care of you. We both try to attend your school parents evenings together and all of the things that need to be done around the house are shared. I have no specific job within our household and neither does he.

Me: Do you believe this has changed now that I am older? Have your chores changed since i was young?

Respondent: When you were a baby I had to leave work and your father worked and was away for long periods of time and therefore our chores could not be shared. I took care of you and the house while your father worked. So I suppose my chores have changed somehow.

Me: Lovely, what do you think has made the change?

Respondent: The fact that we moved to London, I got a better job and the fact that we had always shared chores; we weren’t like other couples who had the ideal view of the family.

Me: Right, ideal view?

Respondent: Yes, woman stays at home with the house and the children while her husband goes out to work. We never thought like this but while you were young and I had no job, there was no other choice.

Me: Oh okay, thank you so much, you were a great help!

Young Girl from today:

Me: Hello, I am doing my Sociology coursework investigation on what changes there have been in the family roles for men and women. I will ask you some questions on your opinion on certain aspects of the family and you can answer as fully as you would like, but as much detail as possible. Is that alright?

Respondent: Yeah that’s alright, go on.

Me: Alright, so first of all are you married or in a relationship?

Respondent: Yes, I’m in a relationship.

Me: Good, how do you and your boyfriend behave around the house? Are there specific chores for each one of you?

Respondent: We tend to share most of our chores around the house, I don’t have a specific chore and neither does he, and we pretty much share everything. It’s different from how i grew up where my mother had all the home based chores while my father was off at work or watching TV. I’ve always said that would not happen in my own household.

Me: Yes, why is it you didn’t want your household to be like that?

Respondent: What’s the point? It’s not fair. Women and men are equal so why should one have to do more work than the other?

Me: Very true, thank you for your help!

Books I used to collect secondary data

“Sociology Themes and Perspective” by Haralambos and Holborn

“An Introduction to Sociology” by Ken Browne