“Things that go on inside families are at the heart of the reproduction of class, but to date, sociologists tend to treat family structures and dynamics as outcomes, rather than causes, of social change,” according to Professor Jane Gray, Maynooth University Department of Sociology.
Professor Gray was exploring the theme of family and class in her inaugural professorial lecture ‘Lineages of class and community: How Irish family practices create social change,’ delivered as part of the first Maynooth Week 2018.
Prof Gray’s research has long explored the role of family in Irish society, and the relationship between family dynamics and class formation. She has sought to re-examine this theme, treating family processes and dynamics as giving rise to social change, rather than asking how larger social trends lead to changes in family life.
New theoretical and methodological approaches offer new opportunities to address the topic, according to Prof Gray. One of these opportunities comes from the Life Histories and Social Change (LHSC) research project, funded by the Irish Research Council. This gathered together 113 retrospective life story interviews with participants in three birth cohorts: those born before 1935, those born between 1945 and 1954, and those born between 1965 and 1974.
Prof Gray notes: “The LHSC study is a critical data infrastructure that opens up the explanatory power of what has come to be known as ‘qualitative longitudinal’ research to scholars across the Irish social science community. It has created the opportunity for us to explore links between individual biographies and social change in the long run – including in terms of family and class formation.”
She says that: “Reading narratives of lives from the older cohorts in the LHSC study brought me back to old questions I have come across in my research about households in Ireland before the onset of ‘modernization’ in the 1960s. Going back to the beginning in this way led me to think again about the relationship between households, extended families, communities and class.”
The LHSC study also asked participants to provide retrospective social network schedules – lists of the people they have known at different stages of their lives – which allow researchers to link structural information about who was important in people’s lives together with their life stories.
This has also allowed Prof Gray to look at the different ways in which people mobilise family and kinship relations within their communities to maintain and enhance social position, and how these practices give rise to class formation.
While the research is only in its early days, as part of her lecture, Prof Gray says, “My research looks to develop an agenda for an approach to understanding family dynamics and social change in a different way, developing a systematic understanding of the lineages of events that tie together the intra and inter-generational family practices revealed by the LHSC study and the changing morphology of Irish society.”