Fictive Family: Everyday Usage, Analytic, and Human Service Considerations

Gubrium, Jaber F.; Buckholdt, David R.

doi:10.1525/aa.1982.84.4.02a00120

Cited by 42 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…The availability and suitability of kinship and non-kinship networks were determined in a descending hierarchical order, through nuclear and extended family networks to neighbours, friends and professional services. These findings substantiate in some respects the notion presented by Gubrium and Buckholdt (1982) that: while for many the term 'family' is formally conceived as signifying kinship status and indeed kinship may be an implicit first rule for its assignment in application the term is not limited to kindred.…”

Section: Fictive Kinsupporting

confidence: 81%

“…This expansion of help beyond the formal kinship systems as represented by 'the biological or quasi-biological linkages between people' has some similarities to the concept of 'fictive kin' as presented by Gubrium and Buckholdt (1982). 'Fictive' kin represents non-biologically related networks, established as 'quasi-familial arrangements', with associated expectations about rights and obligations comparable to those found in nuclear and extended family relationships.…”

Section: Fictive Kinmentioning

confidence: 83%

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The identification and provision of care for the terminally ill at home by ‘family’ members

Hunt

1991

Sociology Health & Illness

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Audio-recordings of naturally occurring conversations over a three-month period between five nurses in a Symptom Control Team and fifty four terminally ill cancer patients and their relatives in their own homes form the focus of this study. The SCT nurses specialised in the care of the dying but did not carry out 'hands on' nursing which was given by community nurses. The SCT nurses carried out their work through 'talk'. The main aim of the study is therefore, through analysis of the audiorecordings, to determine how conversational interactions are used by nurses, patients and relatives in dealing with the process of dying. The aspect of the study discussed in this paper deals with the process at first home visits whereby the nurses, patients and relatives establish 'family' memberships and determine eligible sources of help in relation to expected sets of rights and obligations.

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Section: Fictive Kinsupporting

confidence: 81%

Section: Fictive Kinmentioning

confidence: 83%

The identification and provision of care for the terminally ill at home by ‘family’ members

Hunt

1991

Sociology Health & Illness

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“…Connidis (2010), by proposing this more inclusive concept, discredits a merely biological-legal defĳinition of family and suggests that people in diffferent social contexts develop a set of feelings (i.e., trust, love) by which they become attached to others. For Gubrium and Buckholdt (1982), 'family' extends beyond the term's ordinary connotations; that is, family status can also be assigned to those truly concerned for others. This paper uses 'social family' to examine both social and power dynamics that occur between the migrant caregiver and the employer's family.…”

Section: Social Family Fictive Kin and Global Householdingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negotiating the Social Family: Migrant Live-in Elder Care-workers in Taiwan

Lin

Bélanger

2012

Asian J Soc Sci

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In response to difficulties faced by families in caring for the aged, the government of Taiwan launched a foreign live-in caregiver programme in 1992. This paper draws upon literature on family, domestic work and motives for caregiving to examine how the long-term co-residence of migrant live-in elder care-workers reconfigures Taiwanese families. Our analysis, based on in-depth interviews conducted in the summer of 2009 with 20 Vietnamese migrant live-in care-workers, uses the concept of ‘social family’ to document the close emotional and quasi-familial relationships between foreign care-workers and members of Taiwanese families. Narratives shed light on the dynamics of these relationships and show the limitations of the concept. The inherent asymmetrical employer-employee power relationship remains, while workers constantly negotiate contradictory feelings and positions in the intimate sphere of the employers’ private homes. This paper emphasizes the mutual dependency that migrants experience as both workers and members of a new family. Rather than being seen as cheap, disposable labour, migrants become indispensable to the families. It is this dependency and intimacy that make them part of the family, but also continues to make them vulnerable to abuse.

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“…Rather, it had been a focus of a critical mass of anthropologists in the '60s through the '70s, who set out to examine the everyday life and social exchanges in black communities or prisons with the concepts of “pseudo‐kinship”“quasi‐familial arrangements,”“inmate families,”“prison families,” and “play families” (Ward and Kassebaum 1965; Giallombardo 1966; Liebow 1967; Lowenthal and Havens 1968; Heffernan 1972; Hochschild 1973; Stack 1974; Siegal 1978). The more recent constructionist attempts, however, make a marked turn as to underscore the mundane usage of family discourse and the practical implications this usage possesses in promoting the well‐being of actors in different community and human service settings (Gubrium and Buckholdt 1982). For example, in studying the support networks of black elders in low‐income communities, Johnson and Barer (1990) discovered that the informants usually converted friendships into fictive kin relationships which could become replacements of absent or unsatisfying genuine family relationships.…”

Section: Family As a Topic Of Radical Constructionismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Limit of the Discursive: A Critique of the Radical Constructionist Approach to Family Experience

2012

The Sociological Quarterly

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To date, the postmodernist approach to family experience which considers the actor's use of discourse rather than external sociocultural forces as primordial in constituting domestic reality has become an intellectual stream which sociologists can hardly ignore. Using the Gubrium–Holstein model as an exemplar for a “more sophisticated” postmodernist approach to constructing family experience, this article attempts to outline a critique of radical constructionism which overemphasizes the discourse of actors as artfully producing reality as featured in the notions of “doing things with words” and “talking reality into being.” The critique is mainly based on the works of Schutz and Garfinkel, of which Gubrium and Holstein claim their own model share “abiding concern,” and is further supplemented by the work of Bourdieu. This article carries a commitment to rebuking the postmodernist emphasis on the discursive by highlighting that the prepredicative structure of the lifeworld—which is nondiscursive in nature—constitutes the primordial, albeit insufficient, basis of the nomos pertaining to experience as constituted.

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Fictive Family: Everyday Usage, Analytic, and Human Service Considerations

Cited by 42 publications

References 21 publications

The identification and provision of care for the terminally ill at home by ‘family’ members

The identification and provision of care for the terminally ill at home by ‘family’ members

Negotiating the Social Family: Migrant Live-in Elder Care-workers in Taiwan

The Limit of the Discursive: A Critique of the Radical Constructionist Approach to Family Experience

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