Theory performs vital descriptive, sensitizing, integrative, explanatory, and value functions in the generation of knowledge about families. Yet theory and research can also simultaneously misconceive, desensitize, misdirect, misinterpret, and devalue. Overcoming the degenerative potentialities of theory and research requires attention to critical theorizing, a joint process of (a) critically examining the explicit and implicit assumptions of theory and research and (b) using dialogical theoretical practices. I draw upon the work of John Stuart Mill to argue that critical and dialogical theorizing is a vital and necessary practice in the production of understandings of family phenomena that are more fully scientific and empirical. A brief examination of behavioral research on marital interaction illustrates the importance of critical theorizing.
Phenomenology is introduced as a source of new insights into how family relations are lived and experienced today. The ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas holds particular promise in this endeavor, as his work highlights the ways in which family life emerges out of an ethical relationality that is operative in virtually all family relations. Through learning to see how ethical relationality informs the active, ongoing responsiveness of the ways of being of family members, forms of violence in family life, and the relation between family and other social organizations, interests, and institutions, ethical phenomenology can assist interpretive family research in making manifest dimensions of family life that were previously overlooked and unappreciated, and it can contribute to the development of theoretical innovations in understanding family.
We review how recent family scholarship theorizes recent family change as either a process of deinstitutionalization, in which family can no longer be understood in institutional terms, or a process of diversification, in which family life is expanding but not losing its institutional character. We argue that both approaches emerge out of and depend on a social institutional framework for understanding family that was developed in 20th‐century sociology. Despite producing a wealth of research, both approaches have difficulty adequately conceptualizing the institutional character of family and providing ways of theorizing family change. We introduce an alternative to a social institutional framework, a Weberian institutional logics approach, which provides a different way to understand the institutional character of family life and thereby affords new interpretations and avenues for theory and research on family change in the 21st century.
The central framework for contemporary marital science was formed in the 1930s and centers on the uncritical acceptance of the primacy of method over theory in the pursuit of disengaged, amoral knowledge claims. This pursuit results in the unexamined commitment to an ontology of an essentialist and atomistic self and marriage as a self‐defining relation. An interpretive alternative based in the work of Charles Taylor understands marital actors as self‐interpreting agents for whom the question of the quality of their marriage is unavoidable and constitutive of their marital relations. Only by taking up the question of marital quality directly, in ways consonant with lived marital relations, can marital scholars adequately theorize the empirical reality of contemporary marital relations.
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