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In order to understand the relationship of Jewish religion and the Jewish family one has to examine some of the major basic sources dealing with Jewish life. The paper highlights selected commentaries related to the Jewish family, found in the Old Testament and the Talmud. The basic values related to the Jewish family as expounded by the Talmud are explained. The relationship of the celebration of Jewish religious holidays and family life are summarized, and the life cycle and its allied practices are noted. The paper concludes with a summary taken from the work of Nachum N. Glatzer, which explains the strengths inherent in classical Jewish family life.

The present paper is concerned with an examination of the effects of urbanization on patterns of familial organization in Douala, the major city of the Cameroun. In contrast to the theories of social change that treat urbanization of means and urbanization of ends as coterminous, the paper attempts to distinguish these two dimensions from one another and to show that their effect of traditional familial institutions are distinctive. Thus the two authors show that declines in the incidence of polygyny or of extended familism are not necessarily linear and that the significance of these declines might be in some cases attributed to the restraints confronting newly urbanized populations, while it clearly results from a modernization of individual aspirations in other instances. In addition, the authors show that urbanization is associated with changes in the functions traditionally assigned to plural marriage or to extended familism as well as in the interaction between these two facets of familial arrangements.

After consideration of the many possible functions of kinship systems, the author adopts a definition that does not refer directly to functions: a kinship system is an elaborate institutional pattern controlling collectivities and roles that are focused upon, or ascribed on the basis of, sexual unions, biological relatedness through sexual unions and common residence. Reasons are given for treating the family as a “social system” rather than a “group” of concrete personalities. The author discusses eight invariant foci for the comparative analysis of all kinship systems and summarizes reasons for the near-universality of the nuclear family and the primary incest taboo. The relative distinctiveness of the modern independent nuclear family and four of its advantages are specified in functional and evolutionary terms. To prevent misunderstanding, however, the author makes eight further points or qualifications and discusses briefly some of the problems of the independent nuclear family. The paper ends with the observation that the so-called structural-functional approach can synthesize the results of a good deal of research that is not explicitly structural-functional. The paper itself leans above all on Talcott Parsons but also draws upon Ralph Linton, George Peter Murdock, Claude Levi-Strauss, and William Goode, among others.

Remarriage is a social institution; that is, it is an established pattern of operating which serves both public and private interests in an orderly, accepted, enduring way. A remarriage contains a valuable combination: the reality of a disruption of some kind and degree, and an attempt at reorganization. In short, as on of several solutions to family breakdown, it warrants examination per se. To date, little attention has been paid to this topic on the part of North American Sociologists. The paper examines first phenomenon of remarriage, which constitutes 13 per cent per annum of all marriages in Canada. The trends are analyzed. Secondly, a report of selected findings of an exploratory study of remarried subjects, which included 90 previously divorced persons, in Metropolitan Toronto, are presented. The findings relate to attitudes about the divorce, qualities sought in a second mate, reasons for remarriage, advice to those planning a second marriage, sexual adjustment, expectations in a second union, and and satisfaction found in a second marriage. A review of the existing literature is included in the paper.

Fictive parent-child or patron-client relations (oyabun-kobun kankei) form the basis of Japanese social relations. Such relations also permeats Japanese religion. After outlining some examples of fictive parent-child relations in Japanese rites of passage, the author briefly discusses secular oyabun-kobun relations and how they are reflected in religious institutions and in bonds between disciple and religious teacher or founder. The main part of the paper deals with the similar kind of relations that are formed between the Japanese believer and supernatural beings such as kami, Buddhas and ancestors. The data presented is drawn primarily from the author’s field work in a small Japanese farming community. Besides observing the villagers’ active religious life, the writer administered a questionnaire regarding beliefs and values to a random sample of adults in the village. It was found that supernatural beings are conceived of as close and familiar guardians whose past and present blessings are repaid by rites of gratitude.

Against the background of the traditional procedures and functions of ancestor worship in Korea, the recent changes in actual practices and certain selected attitudes are examined in this paper. The changing patterns indicate that those traditional or religious elements that are directly contradictory to the ideology of modernization and yet not conflicting with the fundamental values of ancestor worship, are more easily susceptible to change, as compared to those elements which constitute the basic values of ancestor worship. On the basis of such findings, the future of ancestor worship in Korea, both short and long ranges, is also discussed.

The main purpose of this paper is to examine religious involvement as measured by church attendance, and how it is related to various dimensions of sexual expression within marriage for women. Data on marital sexual behavior as related to church attendance is examined for 1,442 Australian women and 2,372 women in the United States. In general the evidence supports the assumption that women who are religious are more conservative in their sexual behavior than are women who are not religious. Our evidence also indicates that religion tends to influence marital sex in Australia and the United States in essentially the same way. There is some evidence that sex roles are more segregated in Australia and there is more confusion and frustration on the part of Australian women in sexual matters than there is for American women.

This paper explores the relationship between profession and practice in respect to premarital intercourse. The sample of 761 respondents was drawn from University and Vocational School students in Alberta and Ontario. Four morality standards were identified: the abstinence standard; the double standard; the love standard; and the fun standard. Cross-tabulation of respondents in terms of their professed sexual standards and their behavioral sexual standards gave rise to a series of meaningful types (including “regretful celibate” and “reluctant non-virgin”). Profiles of these various types were drawn, using available background data. These data were interpreted as suggesting that despite increasing sexual emancipation, there is yet indication of the rating, dating, dalliance, and exploitation patterns described by Waller many years ago, si nee women more frequently identify with the abstinence and love standards, while men more frequently identify with the double and fun standards. Our data suggest that there is yet no clear indication which of these two sets of standards will become preeminent.

In the study of Arab society, religion is often seen as a major determinant of family structure, and of the status and role of women in society. This linkage, however, may not be so close as has been assumed. One way of testing it empirically is to compare the attitudes and behaviour of different religious groups within a single Arab country. If the different religious groups show similar attitudes and behaviour, then the effect of religion may not be so immediate and direct as has been thought. Data are presented in the paper that substantiate this argument. The data describe the system of norms held for women’s behaviour by a large sample of non-elite educated youth in Lebanon. The sample corrects for the differences in social status and educational attainments of different religious groups. It is found that, although there are substantial differences between the norms held by young men and those held by young women, the differences by religious affiliation are small and inconsistent. A discussion is presented of this apparent absence of effect of religious affiliation.

In this paper the family is treated as one of many possible foci of identity which tend to become sacralized. Sacralization is used in the sense of a further integration or institutionalisation by means of objectification, commitment, ritual or myth. Evidence for the sacralization of the family and/or the functions it fulfilled are taken from a large variety of cultures. The frame of reference is then used for the explanation of empirical data regarding divorce, mixed marriages, fertility, religious practice of parents and children and rites of passage in Australia.

American ties with secondary or more distant kin are nearly always mediated through ties with both parents in one’s own household. The structuring of kinship through affinal linkages takes place distinctively within the domestic household cycle, with relatives more important in the childhood/young married rather than the puberty/middle age phase. Additionally further differentiation and patterning develops around sex, generational, lineal, and collateral divisions of family organization. In absence of clear-cut corporate systems of kinship the ties developing through affinal relatives take on a significance as yet unappreciated by students of American social organization. Seventeen substantive conclusions are listed at the close of the paper.

The paper reports the findings in socialization practices of deviant and “normal” samples in Santiago, Chile. Responses to the interviews with 60 schizophrenics, 52 juvenile delinquents, and 175 “normals” or “controls” revealed marked differences in their child rearing experiences Parental rejection, especially by, the father, seemed particularly critical in the schizophrenic sample, whereas the delinquent sample had experienced both rejection and ovetly harsh discipline. The mothers were often perceived as manipulative, and with a high rate of absenteeism among the fathers, the mother often had to fulfill, however inadequately, both the instrumental and expressive roles. Despite the differences in age, sex, and social class between the three samples, the study points to varying types of emotional climate within the home as significant in personal and social adjustment.

This paper presents the results of a questionnaire study of 700 English speaking and 404 French speaking Canadian university and trade school students, dealing with attitudes toward a number of marital role issues. Factor analysis and step regression analysis procedures were used. Although the English speaking sample was generally more egalitarian in marital role expectations than the French speaking sample, this pattern was reversed on issues relating to the employment of the wife. Women were more egalitarian than men in both samples and English speaking men were more egalitarian than French speaking men, with the result that sex differences were more pronounced for the French language sample. The regression analysis showed that egalitarianism indices were better predicted for the French than for the English language data. These data suggest that there are more powerfully entrenched definitions of marital roles in the French-Canadian culture than in the Anglo- Canadian culture.

An effort is made in this paper to determine the degree of change in the status of women that has occurred in a traditional Muslim society where higher education is available to women and which offers preparation for occupational careers as alternatives to marriage. In a study done in 1968, a 50 percent sample of the women graduates was taken from all the Arts and Science departments of the University of Karachi and a 25 percent sample from the University of the Punjab in Lahore, West Pakistan of the class of 1966. Based on fathers’ occupation, the bulk of the students came of upper-middle and upper-class families. The educational achievements of the women graduates not only surpassed that of their mothers, by a wide margin, but that of their fathers. Natural Science graduates had the highest employment rates and the Humanities graduates the lowest, with Social Science graduates falling inbetween. Karachi, as the major industrial and commercial center of the nation offers greater employment opportunity than does Lahore, but the constraints of purdah limit middle and upper class women to those situations where only women are employed. The majority of those employed were teaching at girls’ schools or colleges. The parents of the Lahore graduates were found to be more than twice as conservative as the Karachi parents in the matter of not wanting or permitting their daughters to accept employment, and the majority of both samples permit their daughters to work only under purdah conditions. A modification of Lerner’s typology would indicate that the students’ mothers could be termed “traditional”; those graduates whose families refused to permit them to enter the labor market as “transitionals”, and those who have taken employment as a tentative alternative to marriage as “moderns”.

The structural and organizational features of all 477 registered family associations in Lebanon, their underlying functions, pattern and trend are surveyed in an effort to examine how a kinship culture reacts to the disruptive forces associated with the decline in kinship. The central argument of the paper supplements the hypothesis that extended family relations need not be inconsistent with urban and industrial societies. It is suggested that efforts to coalesce the family by creating formal kinship associations should not be dismissed as an irrational or nostalgic gesture. Rather, they are a response to some unmet needs, and they continue to serve some vital and unique functions in Lebanon. Apart from the conventional welfare and benevolent functions, they assist individuals in the quest for opportunity and employment and serve as a vehicle for family solidarity and the advancement of the social, economic and political interests of the family as a social group. They also provide a measure of primary group reinforcements and mediation services -both of which are vital for coping with some of the private troubles and social tensions of a society in transition. Finally, it is suggested that family associations have survived as viable agencies of social organization and social control because they combine some of the rational features of formal organizations with the needs for intimacy and identity inherent in primary relations.

Increasing industrialization, urbanization, and spatial mobility, along with such other socio-economic factors as more education for more people, have contribured to many changes currently taking place in Korean family life patterns. This paper examines the changing patterns in household size and family composition, household types, mate selection, and age at first marriage, including the changes in the criteria used for selecting prospective mates. Closely related to these changes are the concomitant changes in decreasing kinship ties, in the increasing rate of divorce, and the problems of the aged.

This paper considers some contemporary demographic, occupational, and ideological challenges to the American family and their implications for future developments. Recent discoveries in biology are also touched upon with a view to their effects on reproductive and marital behavior. Both short range and longe range changes are examined, as is the receptivity of various segments of the American public to these changes.

This paper examines family and household structure in a Japanese pioneer community in eastern Bolivia. The emphasis is upon the effects of the ecological shift from intensive irrigation agriculture and the nucleated rural settlement pattern of the homeland to extensive shifting agriculture and a dispersed settlement pattern in Bolivia on family and household organization The “traditional” Japanese family system, which is apparently rapidly breaking down in Japan itself as a result of urbanization and industrialization, is briefly described, and data are presented on the structure of household units in the pioneer community. These data indicate a rather surprising persistence of the traditional system, and it is conluded that this system is proving remarkably adaptive to the exigencies of the frontier situation.

This paper reports on a piece of “n of 1” research that is aimed at discerning those things that happen to the character and quality of family interaction when a known, but undiscussed, crisis is approached. The particular, anticipated critical event is open-heart surgery for a father of five. The research method is naturalistic and the research orientation is that of hypothesis generation rather than hypothesis validation. Observational date derived from eighteen bi-weekly home visits, made over the six months preceding surgery, were transcribed, coded, and tabulated, and so organized as to permit comparison of early, middle and late phases of family reactivity to stress. While ultimately the father survives, the family - blue-collar and middle- American - is found to display many culturally prevalent attitudes toward illness and death. The research seeks to describe how these attitudes are translated into behavior and how the family successively alters its adaptive modes. Most especially, the research is concerned with statistically documenting the manner in which interpersonal happenings and transactions are reordered over time and under the accumulating stresses of a count-down to immanent death. Among the mechanisms revealed are modified role functioning, realignments in emitted behavior and in targetting, systematized scapegoating, and the development of laconic interpersonal exchange.

The paper gives an account of the results of research dealing with the role. of social factors in the development of fertility. Answers received in the: course of the fertility and family planning survey of 1965-1967, as to what reasons the women included in) the survey gave for using birth control, are published. The analysis of the survey data on the desired number of children has pointed out that earning activity is a considerable factor. Introduction of the maternity allowance has undoubtedly contributed to the increase in the number of births by earning mothers. However, it could be established that the influence of the allowance was different in the various social strata. Similarly, there was a difference by social strata in the proportions of women utilizing allowance. The different proportions reflect the fact that the dilemma of giving priority to maternity, and of bearing the disadvantages accompanying the interruption of the professional career for several years, arises differently for women of different social strata. As a conclusion, the author compares the results achieved on the basis of the survey on the influence of the child allowance care, according to which the fertility levels of different strata have approximated each other, with the results of a social restratification survey performed by the Demographic Research Institute, showing the same tendency.