This article examines the notion of ‘family’ to consider how it may be understood in people's everyday lives. Certain recurrent and powerful motifs are apparent, notably themes of togetherness and belonging, in the context of a unit that the person can be ‘part of’. At the same time, there may be important variations in the meanings given to individuality and family, evoking differing understandings of the self and personhood. I consider these ideas further through globally relevant but variable cultural themes of autonomy and relationality, suggesting the term ‘social person’ as a heuristic device to distinguish the sense of ‘close‐knit selves’ that may be involved in some understandings of personhood. I argue that this version of personhood may be powerfully expressed through ‘family’ meanings, with a significance which can be at least provisionally mapped along lines of inequality and disadvantage within and between societies around the world. These forms of connectedness may be hard to grasp through those theoretical and methodological frameworks which emphasize the (relational) individual. I argue that, in affluent English speaking societies,1 there may be little alternative to the language of ‘family’ for expressing such forms of relationality and connection.

Family lives are an area where people's moral identities are crucially at stake. Yet the significance of dependent children to the work needed to sustain morally adequate adult identities is largely overlooked. Furthermore, the particular situation of divorce or separation and repartnering where children are involved is fundamentally relevant to current sociological debates about the changing nature of marriage and family life. Notions of the pursuit of self-development and couple intimacy clash and create tensions with notions of duty or responsibility to children's needs. Drawing on a study of parents and step-parents, we consider how interviewees' moral understandings were fundamentally shaped by social constructions of the Child and the Adult. Importantly, the presence of dependent children led to an overall key moral imperative concerning the requirement for responsible adults to put the needs of children first. There were, however, strong gender dimensions in the ways in which this moral imperative was played out, and in some tensions with an alternative, but secondary, moral ethic of care of self. We discuss the significance of the Child/Adult construction in relation to theories about the nature of contemporary family obligations and of contemporary morality more generally.

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Ireland has become a multicultural society in just over a decade, with non-Irish nationals comprising 12% of the population. The challenge for nurses working in the Irish healthcare system is to provide culturally appropriate care to this diverse population. This paper reports on a qualitative descriptive study exploring nurses' experiences of communicating with people from diverse cultures, and focuses on language barriers and the use of interpreters. The findings indicate that communicating with people who do not share the same first language is challenging, in particular the participants (nurses) were concerned about their ability to make a comprehensive assessment that ultimately forms the basis for quality care provision. The use of interpreters can inform the assessment process, but there are challenges in accessing and utilising these services. Further continuing education is required to promote culturally appropriate care. There is a need for increased discussion between nurses and interpreters to maximise communication with patients.

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The central concern of this paper is that there has been a move within British sociology to subsume (or sometimes, even replace) the concept of 'family' within ideas about personal life, intimacy and kinship. It calls attention to what will be lost sight of by this conceptual move: an understanding of the collective whole beyond the aggregation of individuals; the creation of lacunae that will be (partially) filled by other disciplines; and engagement with policy developments and professional practices that focus on 'family' as a core, institutionalised, idea. While repudiating the necessity (and indeed, pointing out the dangers) of providing any definitive answer to definitions of 'family', the paper calls for critical reflection on the implications of these conceptual moves.

This paper reflects on the methodological complexities of producing emotionally-sensed knowledge about responses to family deaths in urban Senegal. Through engaging in 'uncomfortable reflexivity', we critically explore the multiple positionings of the research team comprised of UK, Senegalese and Burkinabé researchers and those of participants in Senegal and interrogate our own cultural assumptions. We explore the emotional labour of the research process from an ethic of care perspective and reflect on how our multiple positionings and emotions influence the production and interpretation of the data, particularly exemplified through our differing responses to diverse meanings of 'family' and religious refrains. We show how our approach of 'uncomfortable reflexivity' helps to reveal the work of emotions in research, thereby producing 'emotionally sensed knowledge' about responses to death and contributing to the cross-cultural study of emotions.

She was Co-investigator for the Death in the Family in Urban Senegal research project. Her research interests focus on people's family lives and relationships, experiences and forms of relationality as these are shaped across global and local contexts, and by gender and generation, including aspects of emotions and embodiment. See: http://www.open.ac.uk/people/jcrm2.