Family meanings
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| 1 Tutor-marked assignment (TMA) | |
| End-of-course assessment | No residential school |
Register for the course
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No current presentation - see Future availability |
| This course is expected to run until October 2009. | |||
Summary
Family lives are constantly being scrutinised, but debates seem to sidestep the question of what ‘family’ means. This 12-week online course provides a strong grounding for any student who is interested in exploring families and personal relationships, and the connections between ‘family’ and wider social concerns. You will focus on what ‘family’ means in our everyday lives, in family research and statistics, and policy and professional practice – drawing on varied social science, historical and comparative perspectives. The course will develop your skills in interpreting research data and equip you to approach family studies and interventions with a sound foundation and new insights.
Course content
We think about many of our relationships through the lens of ‘family’, not only in our personal world views and inner lives, but also in our wider social interactions. Indeed, it is difficult to think about policy and practices in many areas of social and personal life such as health, caring, education, housing and criminal justice without ‘family’ being somewhere in the background. And yet, what is meant by ‘family’ in all these contexts is often taken for granted without being explained or questioned.
Family meanings directly addresses this puzzle by taking two different approaches. Firstly, by looking at evidence about families and learning how both qualitative and quantitative data have been used to build an understanding of family life. You will be analysing interviews with people talking about their everyday lives in order to think about the many ways that ideas about family are significant – for the interviewees, for researchers, and for you. You will also be interpreting statistics about change and continuity in households and families over time, and how these categories came to be firmly established in quantitative social research.
The second approach is to look at ideas and debates about the family. You will read and discuss some of the key ideas from sociologists who have questioned common-sense concepts of ‘the family’ and also in some cases offered alternative ways of framing our personal relationships. To bring these two approaches together, the course turns to social policies and professional practices to explore how assumptions, ideas and evidence about families are built into the heart of welfare provision and services. You will explore how values are afforded to different family meanings and how these legitimise certain experiences of family living.
The Course Reader provides explanations, activities and further questions which build on and link together these two approaches. There are audio CDs to guide you through the process of interpreting qualitative interviews and to provide discussions with key sociologists in this field about some central concepts in the field of family studies. The course is delivered online through the Open University’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
The course website provides downloadable additional readings and materials, including links to the latest statistics about families in the UK. It also suggests ways of continuing in the field of family studies by indicating other courses that include relevant content and approaches. There is an online forum where study advisers and students discuss what they are learning and how to prepare for the assignment and end-of-course assessment.
You will learn
- about some key debates around the concept of ‘family’ and the implications of these debates for social policy and professional practice
- to develop a critical approach to research and academic debates
- to interpret and critically evaluate qualitative and quantitative evidence and how values are attributed to different family meansings
- how to present a written argument using academic conventions.
Vocational relevance
D270 is relevant to a range of jobs and professions that engage with families and policies concerning them. The course will provide skills that would be useful in many vocational contexts, including:
- examining your own and other people’s assumptions about families and family life
- engaging critically with family-related policy and professional practices
- selecting, summarising and synthesising information from different materials and sources.
Entry
D270 is a Level 2 short course. It assumes you will have some experience of general academic study skills such as reading academic texts, essay writing and interpreting social data. This can be obtained either through taking a Level 1 course such as Introducing the social sciences (DD101) (or the discontinued course DD100), An introduction to health and social care (K101) (or the discontinued course K100), or by doing equivalent work at another university.
If you have any doubt about the suitability of the course, please contact our Student Registration & Enquiry Service.
Outside the UK
D270 is mainly concerned with family policies and issues located in the UK using only limited comparative material from elsewhere. However, students outside the UK can draw upon concerns and debates that relate to other parts of the world when studying the UK-based materials in the course.
Preparatory work
No formal preparation is needed, but an active interest in current news and debates about family life would be useful, for example, by reading news reports, policy websites or watching television documentaries.
Qualifications
D270 is an optional course in our
It can also count towards most of our other degrees at bachelors level, where it is equally appropriate to a BA or BSc. We advise you to refer to the relevant qualification descriptions for information on the circumstances in which this course can count towards these qualifications because from time to time the structure and requirements may change.
If you have a disability or additional requirement
Written transcripts of any audio components and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) versions of printed material are available. Some Adobe PDF components may not be available or fully accessible using a screen reader and mathematical, scientific, and foreign language materials may be particularly difficult to read in this way. Large print versions of the course material can be provided on request. Other alternative formats of the course materials may be available in the future. Our Services for disabled students website has the latest information about availability.
If you are a new student, or new to courses using a computer or the internet, you will need to inform us of your particular needs as soon as possible, as some of our support services may take several weeks to arrange. Details of how to do this and our range of support services are described in our booklet Meeting Your Needs which you can download or request from our Student Registration & Enquiry Service.
You can also find information about accessible course materials, financial support and the Disabled Students' Allowance, equipment and other services, on our Services for disabled students website. It also includes our contact details for advice and support both before you register and while you are studying.
Course materials
What's included
Course reader; other written materials; audio CDs; course website.
You will need
CD player.
Computing requirements
This course includes online computer activities – you can access these using a web browser that can play Flash and Shockwave.
You will need internet access and a computer. If you have purchased a new computer since 2002 it should meet your course computing requirements. Check our Technical Requirements section if your computer is older than this or is otherwise unusual.
Teaching and assessment
Study support
You will have access to a study adviser and will receive feedback on your written work.
Contact our Student Registration & Enquiry Service if you want to know more about study with The Open University before you register.
Assessment
The assessment details for this course can be found in the facts box above.
You will be expected to submit your tutor-marked assignment (TMAs) online through the eTMA system unless there are some difficulties which prevent you from doing so. In these circumstances, you must negotiate with your tutor to get their agreement to submit your assignment on paper. The end-of-course assessment (ECA) must be submitted online.
Students also studied
Students who studied this course also studied at some time:
Future availability
The details given here are for the course that starts in October 2009 when it will be available for the last time.
How to register
We regret that we are currently unable to accept registrations for this course. Where the course is to be presented again in the future, relevant registration information will be displayed on this page as soon as it becomes available.
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Student Reviews
Family Meanings is an interesting course which gives you a totally different meaning on family and how the family functions. ...
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Over all I enjoyed this course except for a few problems at the beginning. I found that the course material ...
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