I also know nothing but hearsay about kibbutz. And I know nothing about family mediation (I like the term. I just do old-fashioned family counselling out here in the jungles). But my old hobby-horse of concepts jumps out of this messages. What is social bonding? I recently advised an international research funding agency against funding a study which aimed at studying the impact of migration on mother-child attachment. I know that this is a concept cherished by very famous people and there are lots of instruments to quantify it.
But what does it mean in operationalizable concepts, operationalizable (sorry) in terms of quantification and intervention? What is a ‘nuclear family’ in social/functional terms?
Not much meaning. What is ‘their community’ in such terms? Little meaning. And if someone thinks that ‘extended families are even better. so that there is support outside of the nuclear group’: we have one woman burnt to death in Delhi for more dowry by the
husband’s extended family every day. The problem is: the ‘harder’ data are the less relevant they tend to be in functional terms.
What is a family?
December 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment
