This is a book about families and how they have changed since 1960. It is based on the findings of two studies of the family in Swansea (in western industrial South Wales), one carried out in 1960 (Rosser and Harris, 1965), the other in the first few years of the 21st century. It therefore provides a unique perspective on how families in a particular place have been affected by the massive social changes of recent decades. In the 1960 study, Rosser and Harris charted how changes during the period 1900 to 1960 had affected family life, particularly how kin living in separate households related to each other; their focus was on extended families. They characterised the social change occurring between 1900 and 1960 as a move from a cohesive to a mobile society (Rosser and Harris, 1965, 15; Crow, 2002a) and argued that increased occupational and geographical differentiation within kinship networks resulted in a reduction in the ‘kin connectedness’ of society. Their findings were underpinned by a Durkheimian theoretical framework which understood social change as involving a shift from solidarity based on sameness, including shared occupational status, shared geographical locality and shared norms and values, towards increasing occupational and geographical differentiation, with the attendant risk of a breakdown in solidarity and cohesiveness. In 1960 this breakdown had not occurred, but increasing differentiation had led to a ‘modified extended family’ which, although under strain, was still able to function as a source of support and identity for its members.

In the ‘noughties’, in contrast, the relationship between families and social change is understood in different terms, most of which take the 1960s as marking a major social transition. This transition is variously conceptualised as the shift from modernity to post-modernity, reflexive modernity, late modernity or risk society, from industrial to post-industrial society, and from patriarchal to a less patriarchal society. Associated with fundamental structural change are cultural changes involving, inter alia, a move from material to post-material values. Concepts such as globalisation, individualisation, detraditionalisation and reflexivity have all been used to try and capture these social changes and to describe the type of society in which we are now living. They have also been influential in research on families. Thus, what is happening to families is often understood in terms of increasing individualisation and detraditionalisation.