Dr. Jane Gray interviewed on the 21st Century Family

Dr. Jane Gray, Sociology
Friday, March 20, 2015 - 00:00

Dr. Jane Gray's research on the C21 Irish family featured recently in the Irish Independent

The article states that: "Generally, we found that people continue to articulate very similar values," says Dr Jane Gray, a lecturer in Sociology at NUI Maynooth, who recently carried out qualitative research into the 21st-century Irish family. "Marriage is still very important to people. Yes, there are changes - but there are also deep underlying continuities in Irish families and what they value, and the quality of family relationships as well." She goes on to discuss the resilience of marriage, the decline at mass attendance and the changing structure of authority in the contemporary Irish family. 

Dr. Jane Gray is a Principal Investigator on the Framework 7 project RESCuE: Patterns of Resilience during Socioeconomic Crises among Households in Europe, which includes partners from nine European member and neighbour states.

Using innovative qualitative methods, RESCuE will analyse the impact of the current crisis on households and examine everyday practices for coping with those impacts. The project will examine how communities, local state institutions, and intersecting forms of social inequality shape household practices in urban and rural areas.  It will develop a comparative typology of resilience in different countries and localities under different welfare state institutions and in varying socioeconomic environments, and will disseminate the research results to the public, policy stakeholders and the scientific community.