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Stepfamily Relationships: Development, Dynamics, and Interventions, by Lawrence H Ganong and Marilyn Coleman, is reviewed.
Eur J Population (2007) 23:101103
DOI 10.1007/s10680-006-9109-z
Published online: 13 March 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
Anyone who studies stepfamilies should read this book. It provides as comprehensive a review as possible of the explosion of research on stepfamilies in recent years, with 30 pages of references in very small type. As the authors note in the preface, the book is much more than an update of their previous review. Simply considering their previous title, Remarried family relationships (Ganong & Coleman, 1994), tells us that the world of stepfamilies has moved on. No longer are stepfamilies formed only by marriage. Step-parents may or may not be married to a childs original parent; they may not be of the opposite sex.
Those familiar with the authors other reviews and empirical work will not be surprised that they take a normative-adaptive perspective. What this means in practice is that they look for the positive and neutral in comparisons between stepfamilies and other family arrangements, rather than setting out to explain expected decit comparisons with original two-parent families. The perspective does not, however, prevent them from reliably reporting step-family problems when they are observed nor does it lead them to gloss over very real structural and interactional barriers stepfamilies face as they strive to develop healthy levels of intimacy and solidarity.
The rst chapter provides an informative review of the development of research on stepfamilies, with useful attention given to the clinical research that preceded the entry of most social scientists into the eld. The authors are undoubtedly correct when they assert that the quality of research on step-families has increased along with its quantity, though this review reports most
E. Thomson
Demography Unit, Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
E. Thomson (&)
Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Lawrence H. Ganong and Marilyn Coleman, Stepfamily Relationships: Development, Dynamics, and Interventions
New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2004, ix + 270 pp. Elizabeth Thomson
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of the improvement in quality to be on the methodological side. The fact that Andrew Cherlins extremely clever concept of incomplete institutionalization receives pride of place in chapter 2 suggests that new theoretical ideas about stepfamily relationships have yet to emerge. I return to this point below.
Most of the chapters are devoted to one or another dimensions of step-family life. Chapter 3 charts the different pathways toward stepfamily life and the variety of stepfamily structures that result. The chapter incorporates material on co-parenting that might have been better integrated with chapters on the parentchild relationship. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 focus on the pair relationship that creates a stepfamilyhow it develops in courtship, how the partners negotiate their relationship once they have begun to live together, and the particular challenges faced by gay and lesbian couples with stepchildren. Chapters 7, 8 and 9 deal with children in stepfamilies: parentchild relationships, consequences of stepfamily living for child well-being and relationships among various sorts of siblings. The nal research chapter focuses on segments of the extended family, grandparents and step grandparents. Each of the chapters deals systematically with extant theory and research. The liberal use of headings and subheadings enables the reader to skim for a particular topic of interest but also reects a certain lack of integration. One has the feeling that articles and book chapters and books were sorted into appropriate sets, summarized and placed in the relevant chapter in some reasonable order without much further attention to connections between them.
A rather interesting feature of the book is the attention given to clinical research on stepfamilies. The attention arises somewhat naturally from a discussion of the origins of stepfamily research in chapter 1. When post-divorce stepfamilies were relatively rare, whatever difculties they experienced showed up in clinicians ofces rather than in large-scale scientic investigations. The penultimate chapter attends solely to more recent clinical theory and research. The inclusion of clinical research may widen the audience for this book and provide a useful introduction of social science to clinical science and vice-versa. When it is time for the next book, perhaps clinical and social scientic approaches can more easily be integrated rather than isolated in different chapters or sections.
The most disappointing feature of this book to me is the overall lack of theoretical integration. One nds glimmers of new theoretical ideas about stepfamilies in each of the chapters but it is difcult to put them together. Chapter 2 attempts to engage theory but limits itself to the concept of culture. Here is where we nd Cherlins ideas but not a full consideration of what an institution really is. The chapter on grandparents and step grandparents points out that kinship becomes quite complicated when stepfamilies are formed (and dissolved and formed again). But it does not consider the implications of the increasing experience of stepfamily life for systems of kinship. In a classic study, Alice and Peter Rossi included step-parents as one of the types of kin toward which one might feel different sorts of obligations. The place of step-parents or step-children relative to, for example, grand-
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parents or cousins or parents-in-law, is extremely informative about the institution of stepfamily rights and responsibilities, more so than comparisons of stepfamily norms to those found in other types of nuclear families. The authors might also have pointed out more clearly that stepfamilies provide a sort of natural experiment with which we can investigate and understand taken-for-granted features of stable two-parent families.
Finally, for readers of this journal, the question naturally arisesis it all about the United States? Yes, for the most part. Because the US is an outlier in the prevalence of separation and re-partnering and because its research enterprise is gigantic, it is perhaps not surprising that a review of extant research should depend so heavily on the US context. This is a pity, however, for some of the key features of stepfamily lifecohabitation, economics, kinshipmay be quite different in countries with different welfare regimes, population densities, communication networks, cultural and economic histories, and so forth. The challenge for (at least) European researchers is to build a body of work from which these or other scholars can produce the next, more theoretically and contextually rich assessment of research on stepfamilies.
In the meantime, this book serves well as a source of reference for family scholars, a basic text for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses, and a stimulus for further research.
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Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007