Defining Some Basic Concepts, Particularly those of Family, Kinship and Marriage

Having looked at the variety of family and marriage forms, it helps to fix the basic vocabulary sociology uses to describe them precisely.

A family is a group of persons directly connected by kinship ties, among whom the adult members take on responsibility for caring for any children in the group. Kinship refers to the connections between individuals that are established either through marriage or through lines of descent linking blood relatives -- parents, siblings and their children, and so on across generations. Marriage itself can be defined as a socially recognised and approved sexual union between two adult individuals. Marrying makes two people kin to each other, but its effects reach further than just the couple: the parents, siblings and other blood relatives of each partner also become relatives of the other partner through the marriage bond.

Sociology also distinguishes between two families that a married person typically belongs to across their life: the family they were born into, called the family of orientation, and the family they form through their own marriage, called the family of procreation. Finally, sociology distinguishes kin by how the tie was formed: relatives connected through blood -- parents, siblings, children -- are called consanguineous kin, while relatives connected through marriage rather than blood are called affines. …