The Family as a Small Group Association.

The article presents information on family as a small group association. Sociologist Reuben Hill's review of family studies includes, as one approach, the conceptualization of the family as a small group association. Sociologist George Homans is mentioned in this connection, though, perhaps naturally, few words are devoted to his actual contribution. His contribution has been both direct in terms of writings on role-relations within the family and indirect in terms of generalizations about small groups which prove to be useful in its study. The present paper follows this indirect route. Interaction frequency and intensity of liking have proven to be two of the more useful variables in small group research. Homans' proposition that "persons who interact frequently with one another tend to like one another" is taken as the starting point for a discussion of some aspects of role-relationships in the English family, mainly that of the traditional working-class. Interaction normally varies with liking only if the interaction is freely chosen and can he broken off when desired. If a member of a group is forced to interact with someone he does not like, the chances are at least as great that he will dislike the other more, as that he will come to like him after all. It seems fair to take length of courtship as a measure of the variables with which people are here concerned and to predict a correlation between interaction, affection and understanding.