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With the background in the confusions about the meaning of the term family, step-family as a concept and idea is studied. Traditionally, the nuclear family acts as a model and an ideological code in everyday life as well as in scholarly work. Here is shown, with step-families as examples, that a person’s family has members from various households. The step-family household is not the same as step-fami ly. Dyadic analysis shows how some members are in direct relationships while others are in indirect or in transitory relationships. This means that members of a person’s family are there for the sake of consanguinity and conjugality as well as for other reasons. Such are inclusion of members in ones family because they are important for the person itself, direct relationships, but included not because of the relationship to the person itself but because they are important for someone else in the person’s family, indirect relationships.
Levin et al. (2000) studied this question.