The sociology of the family in Israel: an outline of its development from the 1950s to the 1980s

This survey of the sociological study of the Israeli family, starting with studies of the early 1950s, reflects the dynamic development of the Israeli reality as well as the patterns of its sociological analysis. The common thread through the studies of the 1950s and 1960s is the perception of the family as reflecting communal and individual needs such as the loneliness of the pioneers or the integration of ethnicities. Later studies emphasized intra-familial factors such as the struggle for equality between the genders, the growth in the ratio of one-parent families and the impact of maternal employment on marriage, fertility and socialization. These new orientations on familial processes has brought Israeli family studies closer to the concerns of the family sociologists in the affluent west.