Changing patterns of marriage, cohabitation, separation, divorce, childbearing and the life course, family diversity, and the increasing variety of household and family structures.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to describe changing patterns of marriage, divorce, cohabitation and childbearing, explain the types of family diversity, and evaluate the modernist versus postmodernist debate about whether one family type still dominates. The key trap is concluding that diversity means the nuclear family has disappeared.

Changing patterns

• Marriage: fewer marriages, people marrying later, more remarriage (creating reconstituted families) and more secular ceremonies, reflecting secularisation, changing attitudes and women's independence.
• Divorce: rates rose sharply after legal changes (the 1969 Divorce Reform Act made divorce cheaper and easier), changing social attitudes and declining stigma, secularisation, and women's growing independence (most divorce petitions are now initiated by women, supporting feminist arguments).
• Cohabitation: has increased markedly, sometimes as a trial marriage, sometimes as a permanent alternative, driven by changing attitudes and the changing position of women.
• Childbearing: more births outside marriage (now around half), more couples delaying or remaining childless, and more lone-parent families (overwhelmingly headed by women).

Types of family diversity

The Rapoports identify five types of diversity: organisational (how roles and structures are arranged, for example dual-earner versus traditional), cultural (differences between ethnic and religious groups), social class (differences in resources and relationships), life-stage (newlyweds, families with children, the retired), and generational (different attitudes and experiences between older and younger generations). They treat diversity positively, as a sign of freedom and choice.

Modernist versus postmodernist views

• Modernist / New Right: the nuclear family remains the ideal and the norm, and diversity (lone parents, cohabitation) is a sign of moral decline.
• Chester: accepts that some diversity exists but argues most people still live in, or pass through, a "neo-conventional family" (a dual-earner nuclear family), so the nuclear family is far from dead, it has simply modernised. A snapshot exaggerates diversity because most people are nuclear at some life stage.
• Postmodernists (Stacey): family life is now diverse, fragmented and chosen; there is no single dominant type, and people actively construct their own forms (Stacey's "divorce-extended" families of ex-partners and relatives in Silicon Valley).
• Individualisation thesis (Beck, Giddens): tradition has weakened, so relationships are increasingly negotiated rather than fixed, producing the "negotiated family" and Giddens's "pure relationship" (which lasts only as long as it satisfies both partners).

Evaluation

The personal-life perspective stresses that people increasingly define family for themselves, supporting the diversity view. But critics of postmodernism (the New Right, and the individualisation thesis's critics) argue diversity is exaggerated: the dual-earner nuclear family remains the most common arrangement at a point in the life course (Chester), and family forms still show clear class and ethnic patterns, so choice is not unlimited. The balanced conclusion is that diversity has supplemented rather than entirely replaced the nuclear norm.