A Theoretical-Conceptual Approach to the Study of Family Organization

This article proposes a theoretical-conceptual corpus for the study of different family organizations. Some central approaches on the theme of family by scholars such as Cicchelli and Cicchelli (1999), Moreno (1995), De Jong (2001), Bawin-Legros (1996) and Quiroz(2000), among others, are presented. This theoretical proposal is located in a subjectivist epistemological perspective; the hermeneutics of validation are the theoretical perspective that permits capturing the meanings and significance that a person or group attaches to their expressions through the investigation of texts, letters and diaries. The study introduces the idea that the "world of life" creates the possibility of thinking in different epistemes caused by distinct forms of social coexistence even in the same spaces and times. Family organizations are multiple and pluralistic, not uniform organizations imposed by the hegemonic discourse of modern western society. Finally, this paper concludes that the idealistic model of the triangular concept of family (father, mother and children) is an ideological fiction, given that family organizations are in permanent transformation and they construct what is cognitive, symbolic and affective within the family social group, which is the provisional result of a chain of personal choices made by each of its members.