As is well known, 1994 was International Year of the Family. Accordingly, “International Year of the Family and Contemporary Families” was the title of the main theme session of the 4th general meeting of the Japanese Society of Family Sociology in 1994.
Up until this time, contemporary families have been largely perceived by contemporary family sociology as modern conjugal families. However, according to the global perspective of I.Y.F., contemporary families in the changing world are not only conjugal, but also encompass many various forms and family systems. This means that it is necessary to change from an industrialized society-centered family model to a global perspective-centered paradigm.
Contemporary families have usually been considered as modern conjugal families and only from the historical perspective of industrialized society. This means there is a lack of global perspective in our family sociology. The I.Y.F. has made it extremely clear that a new perpective on families and a new paradigm are required in family sociology.

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1. The “idealtypic” character of “modern family” and its foundation in reality.
2. The position of the modern family in historical thought.
3. Modern family tendencies of functional reduction in the historical process of modernization.
4.
The structuring principles of the modern family.
The “consumption” principle
The “limited consensus” principle
The “equalitative” relation principle
The “companionship” principle
5. Sociological position of the “modern” and “familistic love”.
6. The principle of “love based community” in the modern family.
7. Changes of family and societal system in the late modern world.
8. The family system in “postmodernization”.

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What is family and what has been family? And what is the raison d'etre of family in our society today?
This paper examines these questions from the viewpoint of gender structure. For this purpose, gender structure will be divided into three realms, ‹power›‹division of labor›‹cathexis›, and observations will be made on some recent phenomena as well as autonomically expanding on these 3 realms. Finally, some effects and problems of these gender movements on modern family, especially from the standpoint of “equality”and “happiness”will be considered.

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Since the 1970s, demographic composition has been changing in Japan, eg. a rising mean age at first marriage, a declining birth rate, and a rapidly growing longer life span. Longer life spans for each generation has influenced flows of resources between parents and their children. In our findings, parents have been giving finacial and many other kinds of aid to their adult children for a long time. Parents, however, expect emotional not financial returns. They wish to maintain emotional ties with their children in future. In a sense, children are the greatest latent 'undeclared asset' for parents.
Actual parent-adult children relationships depend on effects of cohort and socio-economics level, however. So diversity must be taken into consideration when researching generational relationships and contemporary families.

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One of the most important tasks family sociologists have in this International Year of the Family is to theoretically clarify the location and changing process of contemporary families.
Without any theoretical frame of reference, it is impossible to point out the location of contemporary families. So, when discussing contemporary families, an explicit frame of reference is crucial.
As we see, the key phrase “The International Year of the Family” signifies the policy-oriented perspective (=organized by United Nations), i.e. “control” in theoretical terms. The key phrase is also composed of both dimensions of space (= “international”) and time (= “year”).
Our purpose in the theme session was to locate contemporary families in the dimensions of Time, Space and Control, using fundamental frames of reference. The session successfully demonstrated the importance and exciting nature of this purpose, proving the usefulness of theories of modern society, gender and generation as frames of references.

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This Paper exmines whether Dual-Career Couples have possibilities for egalitarian marital relations. It is supposed that dual-career couples have “role-interchangeability”, the equal sharing of domestic and occupational work, because husbands and wives engage in 'careers', that is, professional, managerial or technical occupations which need high occupational commitment.
By comparing such couples with dual-earner couples in terms of their division of domestic work, our research data reveals that dual-career couples are more likely than dual-earner couples to cooperate in domestic work.
But many wives in dual-career couples tend to play a more major role in domestic work. The results of the research show that only in cases where wives are fulltime workers with no children does “role-interchangeability” exist. This can be interpreted as the emrgence of wives' “occupational roles” and freedom from “mothering roles”.
Only the above-mentioned case of dual-career couples demonstrates egalitaian marital relations. It is supposed, however, that such tendencies in these couples will promote egalitarian relations between other types of couples.

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This study investigated the relationship between conjugal agreement patterns and marital satisfaction for a sample of 432 married women. Of the four patterns induced from the “time of discussion” variable and the “agreement” variable, namely explicit agreement, implicit agreement, disagreement, not yet ascertained, the former two correlated with high satisfaction and the later two with low satisfaction. The finding shows that agreement with husbands is of primary importance for marital satisfaction as perceived by wives. Between the former two patterns, the explicit agreement correlated more highly with satisfaction than implicit agreement.
Before marriage, many couples agree tacitly about their marital life plan. In the case of tacit, implicit agreement, the task of “role fit” may not be completely accomplished during the period of marital choice. However, after marriage, they can achieve mutual agreement though discussion. That is, the “role fit” task is attained not only before marriage but after marriage as well.

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In this paper, physical masculinity was defined as the socially expected physical traits of the male body. Similarly, femininity was defined as feminine physical traits.
The purpose of this paper is to clear how masculinity/femininity of both body and personality influence the self-esteem of university students.
The significant findings are : (1) for males, physical masculine components had a medium positive correlation with their self-esteem, for females, physical feminine components had a medium positive correlated; (2) for both males and females, all the components of personality showed a medium or highly positive correlation with their self-esteem; (3) for males, characteistic masculine component, “agency”, was the most important element for leading the positive self-esteem, while for females, the physical femininity, especially “fair skin and slim body”, was the most important element. It is supposed that this gender difference has been originated out of the differences of roles between a male and a female which are socially expected.
In the future research, it would be the major task, to reconstitute the scale for the physical masculinity/femininity, to investigate for the groups with various attributions, and at the same time to check the other effective factors for the self-esteem.

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This paper attemps to clarify the structure of “Burden” experienced by family caregivers for the mentally ill and explores the factors influencing clusters of “Burden”, examines how each group of “Burden” is related to the caregivers' stress response. While a self-rating depression scale is used for an index of caregivers' stress responses, each group of “Burden” is regarded as a stressor.
Significant findings are as follows:
1. “Burden” is divided into four groups —“Burden of daily caregiving”; “Burden of family relations and social relations”; “Burden of compensation for daily caregiving”; “Burden of continuing caregiving”.
2. Each group of “Burden”, especially “Burden of family relations and social relations”, is significantly related to caregiver stress levels.
3. Factors related to each group of “Burden” are different. For example, caregiver gender is only related to “Burden of daily caregiving” and “Burden of compensation for daily caregiving”. On the other hand, substitutability of caregiving in the family and annual household income are only related to “Burden of continuing caregiving”.

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Psychological distress, family role strain, and work role strain were examined using empirical data. Analyses were conducted to clarify the relationship (1) between role combination and distress, as well as role combination and role strain; (2) between social attributes and distress, as well as social attributes and role strain; and (3) between role strain and distress. There was no overt relationship between role combination and distress, nor between role combination and role strain. Distress was affected by family income and coresidence of parents. Family role strain was affected by gender, while work role strain was affected by gender and employment status. Role strain had a strong correlation with distress, while married men and working women had strong correlation between family and work role strains. Hypothetical causal relationships between family and work role strains were also discussed.

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