Welcome to the Companion website!

This site is intended to enhance your use of Sociology of Families, first edition by Teresa Ciabattari. Please note that all the materials on this site are especially geared toward maximizing your understanding of the material.

The family patterns seen in recent decades—cohabitation, divorce, nonmarital childbearing, same-sex marriage and childrearing—can seem like radical changes from the past. But upon closer examination, many are consistent with broader trends that have been going on for centuries. Sociology of Families: Change, Continuity, and Diversity considers this tension between change and continuity, situating families in a social, historical, and economic context, and emphasizing how these contexts create family diversity and inequality. By incorporating diverse family structures into each chapter, author Teresa Ciabattari has written a text that challenges idealized assumptions about how families should be, and instead explores the complex realities of how families actually are.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge Teresa Ciabattari for writing an excellent text and for reviewing the assets on this site. Special thanks are also due to Jamie Chapman of Westminster College for creating the ancillaries on this site.