ABSTRACT
This chapter explains some issues related with family contexts beyond the nuclear family. It focuses on empirical research that people conducted in the United States and Switzerland on the composition of family configurations. Individualization theorists who forecast the decline of the Family have a specific type of families in mind: the nuclear family, constituted by a heterosexual married couple with its co-resident biological children. Jacob Moreno's and Feld's insights about the importance of joint activities or concerns for similar persons have direct implications for the study of families. The configurational perspective states that families do not match institutional criteria. The configurational perspective focuses on individuals and their family ties, rather than on families as homogeneous and well-defined groups. This theoretical shift has several empirical consequences. The Family Network method was drawn from social network research. The number of informal principles that structure family configurations is limited and the available solutions logically organized.
