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- Title
Saving Marriage Culture “One Marriage at a Time”: Relationship Education and the Reinstitutionalization of Marriage in an Era of Individualism.
- Authors
Randles, Jennifer; Avishai, Orit
- Abstract
Since 2000, U.S. federal and state governments have devoted almost $1 billion to marriage and relationship education (MRE) programs that teach the skills and attitudes associated with satisfying, long-term marriages. While advocates argue that MRE is an effective way to counter the negative social outcomes resulting from marital decline, critics contend that it is an ideological policy focused on reinstating the moral primacy of heterosexually married families. Drawing on two ethnographies we argue that this debate misses a key feature of MRE. These interventions simultaneously trace structural issues to individualistic tendencies and assume that social problems related to marriage demand individual-level solutions. We consider how this dilemma played out in social spaces where marriage and relationship education policy was discussed and implemented and how MRE advocates navigated this tension, specifically by articulating, codifying, and teaching new individualized norms for marital behavior. This qualitative case study illustrates a common tension in the framing of social problems in the U.S.: Structural issues are translated into individual deficiencies even when the problem is identified as individualism, thereby limiting the scope of perceived solutions.
- Subjects
COUPLES counseling; FAMILY counseling; MARRIAGE mentoring; ETHNOGRAPHIC analysis; SOCIAL problems; INDIVIDUALISM
- Publication
Qualitative Sociology, 2018, Vol 41, Issue 1, p21
- ISSN
0162-0436
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11133-018-9375-1