"This is a thoughtful and sometimes challenging elaboration of some of the key concepts in contemporary family studies... Students and researchers will want to have this book close to hand, not simply as a reference work but as a stimulus to critical social analysis."
- David H J Morgan, University of Manchester

"Written in an intelligent, engaging, and accessible manner by two leading and highly respected family scholars whose contributions to the field over the past two decades have been path-breaking. This is an important resource for students and professionals studying, and working in, the field of family studies within and across the disciplines of sociology, social policy, social work, health studies, education, and gender studies."
- Andrea Doucet, Carleton University

This book′s individual entries introduce, explain and contextualise key topics within the study of family lives. Definitions, summaries and key words are developed throughout with careful cross-referencing allowing students to move effortlessly between core ideas and themes. Each entry provides:

• Clear definitions
• Lucid accounts of key issues
• Up-to-date suggestions for further reading
• Informative cross-referencin.

Relevant, focused and accessible, this book will provide students with an indispensible guide to the central concepts of family studies.

This is a thoughtful and sometimes challenging elaboration of some of the key concepts in contemporary family studies. In each of the forty-eight short essays, the reader will find a theoretically informed and cross-referenced guide to the major themes that have constituted this highly significant area of the social sciences. Students and researchers will want to have this book close to hand, not simply as a reference work but as a stimulus to critical social analysis
David H J Morgan
Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Manchester

Key Concepts in Family Studies is written in an intelligent, engaging, and accessible manner by two leading and highly respected family scholars whose contributions to the field over the past two decades have been path-breaking. This is an important resource for students and professionals studying, and working in, the field of family studies within and across the disciplines of sociology, social policy, social work, health studies, education, and gender studies
Andrea Doucet
Professor of Sociology
Carleton University, Canada

Jane Ribbens McCarthy is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. She has long-standing interests in family sociology, particularly around parent-child relationships, and her research has included, among other things, mothers and their children, parenting and step-parenting, and the family lives of young people aged 16-18. She has published extensively on these areas, on qualitative methodologies, including auto/biography, and on theories of public and private. Her most recent book, with Rosalind Edwards and Val Gillies, is Making Families: Moral Tales of Parenting and Step-Parenting, Sociologypress, 2003. She is currently engaged on a literature review on ′Young People, Bereavement and Loss′. Further details of her work can be found at http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/staff/jribbens-mccarthy/ Rosalind Edwards is a professor of sociology and a codirector of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods at the University of Southampton. She is an elected fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a founding and coeditor of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology. She has published widely on qualitative and mixed methods, including books on Paradata, Marginalia and Fieldnotes (2017, coedited with J. Goodwin, H. O’Connor, and A. Phoenix), What Is Qualitative Interviewing (2013, with J. Holland), and a Qualitative Research special issue on “Democratising Research Methods” (2017, coedited with T. Brannelly). Currently, she is part of a team exploring the feasibility of conducting secondary analysis across existing data from several qualitative longitudinal studies: http://bigqlr.ncrm.ac.uk/