2017 Volume 68 Issue 1 Pages 25-37
The constructionist approach in Japanese sociology of family attracted a great deal of attention under the circumstances where the “nuclear family framework” based on the modern family model needed to be reformed. This approach was expected to address the question “what is family?” by paying attention to how laypeople define family.
However, although early constructionist family studies revealed a contextualized diversity of definitions of the family, they were never able to suggest how sociologists could define family or offer an answer to the question “what is family?” That these early studies focused on the rhetoric laypeople use to define family has led to the separation of research interests between constructionist family studies and other kind of studies. As a result, empirical studies based on the constructionist approach have not been accumulated in Japanese sociology of family. As a result, this approach has become quite thin in substance.
To overcome this situation, it is important for constructionist family studies to share research interests with other kinds of sociological family studies through focusing on how people experience their family lives and addressing the key question in the sociology of family, namely, “how has family changed and how will it change?”
