Sociology of Family and Relationships

The sociology of family and relationships examines how intimate bonds are formed, maintained and transformed across diverse cultural, economic and political contexts. Rather than treating the family as a fixed institution defined solely by legal or biological ties, scholars explore everyday practices—such as care work, communication technologies and domestic rituals—that enact and contest power, identity and solidarity. Analyses draw on feminist, queer and new-materialist perspectives to reveal how gender norms, sexualities and material environments shape what counts as family. Comparative and global studies highlight how welfare regimes, housing markets and migration histories influence household formation, intergenerational support and conjugal dynamics. By attending to both micro-interactions and macro-structures, this field illuminates how families adapt to demographic change, economic pressure and moral debates, and how inclusive policies and practical interventions can foster wellbeing and social cohesion.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent work has applied economic models to marriage markets in China, showing that rising housing prices and skewed sex ratios have suppressed nuptiality, while higher GDP and education levels partly offset these effects. Genetic methods have also shed light on how partner similarity arises: one study used Mendelian randomisation to disentangle deliberate selection, partner influence and confounding factors, finding that household income, health and education jointly explain much of the correlation between spouses. In the domain of sibling relations, interactive puzzle-solving and game-theory tasks have been validated for adults, revealing that pairs high in dominance engage in more conflictual exchanges, employ fewer turn-taking strategies and show elevated Machiavellian traits, underscoring the role of power in shaping cooperation and competition.

Sociology of Family and Relationships publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in sociology of family and relationships across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Family practices: The routine actions and interactions through which family life is produced, maintained and transformed.

Practice theory: A framework emphasising that social reality is constituted through repeated practices rather than abstract structures or individual attitudes.

Homonormativity: The reproduction of normative, often middle-class ideals of family life within LGBTQ+ communities, reinforcing conventional domestic models.

New materialism: A framework that attends to the agency of non-human actors and material processes in shaping social relations and practices.

Intergenerational care: The mutual provision of practical and emotional support between different age cohorts within a family.

Assortative mating: The tendency for individuals to form partnerships with others who share similar socioeconomic attributes, such as education or income.

References

1. More–than–relationship quality: A feminist new materialist analysis of relationship quality and the potential of digital couple interventions. Journal of Family Theory & Review (2023).
2. Intergenerational care in corona times: Practices of care in Swedish families during the pandemic. Journal of Family Research (2022).
3. The economics of marriage: Evidence from China. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2022).
4. Partner choice, confounding and trait convergence all contribute to phenotypic partner similarity. Nature Human Behaviour (2023).
5. The role of dominance in sibling relationships: differences in interactive cooperative and competitive behavior. Scientific Reports (2023).