Understanding Family Meanings

Jane Ribbens McCarthy is Reader in Family Studies at The Open University. She is an internationally established scholar on family and relationship studies and has helped to shape family sociology in significant ways over the years. She is currently Co-Director of the Families and Relationships programme within the Open University's prestigious Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance.Megan Doolittle is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at The Open University in London. She is a social historian with interests in histories of the family, fatherhood, contemporary families and their alternatives, domestic space and family life, and relationships between social policy and the family. Shelley Day Sclater is a freelance writer. Formerly a lawyer, an academic psychologist and Professor of Psychosocial Studies at University of East London, she now writes fiction. She has won prizes for her short stories and is the 2011 winner of the Andrea Badenoch Award for her novel-in-progress 'The Confession of Stella Moon.' She is doing the Creative Writing MA at Newcastle University.

• Why family meanings?; Part 1: Research: Family meanings in contemporary contexts; Teasing the threads apart; Understanding 'family' and household through quantitative evidence; Part 2: Theories and concepts: Family discourses and family practices; Intimacy and personal life; Part 3: Contexts: Family meanings across time and space; Family meanings in social policies and professional practices; Family meanings and family values.

"Understanding family meanings inspires the reader to reflect on the fluid and dynamic nature of contemporary families. It is an important new contribution to the literature as it highlights the multiplicity of meanings associated with families depending on context." Bahira Sherif Trask, University of Delaware