TY - JOUR
T1 - Behavioral Ecology of the Family: Harnessing Theory to Better Understand Variation in Human Families
T2 - Harnessing theory to better understand variation in human families
AU - Sheppard, Paula
AU - Snopkowski, Kristin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
PY - 2021/7/1
Y1 - 2021/7/1
N2 - Researchers across the social sciences have long been interested in families. How people make decisions such as who to marry, when to have a baby, how big or small a family to have, or whether to stay with a partner or stray are questions that continue to interest economists, sociologists, demographers, and anthropologists. Human families vary across the globe; different cultures have different marriage practices, different ideas about who raises children, and even different notions of what a family is. Human behavioral ecology is a branch of anthropology that is particularly interested in cultural variation of family systems and how these differences impact upon the people that inhabit them; the children, parents, grandparents. It draws on evolutionary theory to direct research and generate testable hypotheses to uncover how different ecologies, including social contexts, can explain diversity in families. In this Special Issue on the behavioral ecology of the family, we have collated a selection of papers that showcase just how useful this framework is for understanding cultural variation in families, which we hope will convince other social scientists interested in family research to draw upon evolutionary and ecological insight in their own work.
AB - Researchers across the social sciences have long been interested in families. How people make decisions such as who to marry, when to have a baby, how big or small a family to have, or whether to stay with a partner or stray are questions that continue to interest economists, sociologists, demographers, and anthropologists. Human families vary across the globe; different cultures have different marriage practices, different ideas about who raises children, and even different notions of what a family is. Human behavioral ecology is a branch of anthropology that is particularly interested in cultural variation of family systems and how these differences impact upon the people that inhabit them; the children, parents, grandparents. It draws on evolutionary theory to direct research and generate testable hypotheses to uncover how different ecologies, including social contexts, can explain diversity in families. In this Special Issue on the behavioral ecology of the family, we have collated a selection of papers that showcase just how useful this framework is for understanding cultural variation in families, which we hope will convince other social scientists interested in family research to draw upon evolutionary and ecological insight in their own work.
KW - cooperation and conflict
KW - cross-cultural variation
KW - family formation
KW - human behavioral ecology
KW - kinship
KW - marriage systems
KW - Cooperative breeding
KW - Kin networks
UR - https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/anthro_facpubs/163
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85169099670&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3390/socsci10070275
DO - 10.3390/socsci10070275
M3 - Article
VL - 10
JO - Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations
JF - Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations
IS - 7
M1 - 275
ER -