Sociology

LUCA SALMIERI
LUCA SALMIERI

1. Knowledge and understanding: after having passed the exam students should master the analytic tools necessary to understand the principal characteristics of modern family unit during a period of important cultural, social and economic changes. Changes have been influent in various ways on the experience that people have of family life. In this context, particular attention is focused on possible consequences over the identity process
2. Applying knowledge and understanding: after having passed the exam students should be able to understand: models of family in different age and societies; Processes involving family, mainly in terms of decreasing of the number of members and the changing of family relationships (crisis, functions and development) from modernity to nowadays; The role of family in keeping social cohesion in western societies; The evolution of the family models in a post-modern era.
3. Critical faculties should be developed through the involvement of students in the elaboration of family issues through the debate, also stimulated by watching movies and writing reports on texts that are recommended during the course
4. Communications skills. The ability to communicate what was learned should be developed through the writing of the reports and debate in the class.
5. Learning skills. The ability to continue studying the topics should be developed through the ability to interpret the evolutions of the family in a reflexive and critic way and to use sociological concepts and categories to describe the reality family. Knowing extend its analysis beyond the immediate data, recognizing the variables (social, economic, cultural) accidents in the situation

Being able to understand and use the different sociological meanings of the concept of family in public discourses, in daily life, in political and cultural analysis and in the historical and anthropological dimensions.
Knowing how to combine the links and ties between family and kinship
Master the concepts and applications related to the institutions of marriage, separation and divorce in relation to other social institutions.
Being able to interpret, analyze and evaluate the variables of gender and generation in the historical-social context.
Knowing how to interpret and research the main relationships between family, economy and work.
Knowing how to interpret and research the main relationships between family, economy and work.
Knowing how to interpret and analyze the impacts of social policies on families.

A basic knowledge of the foundations of anthropology and family history might be helping. This basic knowledge does not, however, represent an obligation to have passed preparatory examinations in the two subjects.

The course aims to provide analytical, conceptual and research tools to identify, analyze, understand and explain the main forms, relationships and structures of families in contemporary society, also comparing the Italian society to other European and Western countries.
The program provides an introduction with historical and anthropological notes on the different forms of family that have made the European and Italian past along the structural changes in the cultural, economic, demographic, political and technology domains. Furthermore, the study program develops around the relationships between families and kinship, includes the processes of formation of family formation - the transition to adult life, cohabitation and/or marriage, parenting and it examines gender and generational relationships within and outside the household, the relationship between the family (and its components) the economy and the labour market, theory and norms form family law, the relationship between families and social policies, the reproduction of gender and generational inequalities as well as class inequalities via the family background.

Both for attending and non attending students
1. Chiara Saraceno e Manuela Naldini, (2021), Sociologia della famiglia, Il Mulino, Bologna.
2. Simonetta Piccone Stella e Luca Salmieri, (2016), Convivere in Italia. La famiglia fuori dal matrimonio, Carocci, Roma.
3. Luca Salmieri, (2022), Servizi sociali e misure a contrasto della povertà. Teorie, pratiche e strumenti per gli assistenti sociali, Franco Angeli, Milano. I capitoli 1, 2, 4, 6.

Further resources available at: https://elearning.uniroma1.it/course/view.php?id=8294

Teaching takes place with lectures, work groups, flipped classroom and also activities in blended e-learning mode on: https://elearning.uniroma1.it/

Attendance is not mandatory

The final exam is oral. However, attending students may opt for the assessment of the ongoing written assignments as a base for the final oral exam.

• Difference between family structures, family relationships, and kinship
• Peter Laslett and the spread of different family structures in European history
• Household economy (historical research by Scott and Tilly)
• Distinction between the concept of exogamy and that of endogamy
• The prohibition of incest
• The relationship between family and society from a sociological perspective: the family and the market (economy); the family and the State (power)
• Family typologies: Structureless, Single-person, Nuclear, Extended, Multiple
• Family life cycle
• Rules of residence (Patrilocal, Matrilocal, Neolocal)
• Rules of descent and inheritance
• Parsons: functionalism; the family according to functionalism; structure of the nuclear family; the stages of socialization
• Family and social stratification
• Factors of change; new family forms
• Division of labor inside and outside the family
• Forms of redistribution within the family: what is redistributed, by whom, and to whom?
• Separations and divorces
• Different family policy traditions in Europe
• Reconstituted families
• De facto families and cohabitation
• Forming a family. The transition to adult life

• Chiara Saraceno e Manuela Naldini, (2021), Sociologia della famiglia, Il Mulino, Bologna 
  • Books: Chiara Saraceno e Manuela Naldini, (2021), Sociologia della famiglia, Il Mulino, Bologna 


• Simonetta Piccone Stella e Luca Salmieri, (2016), Convivere in Italia. La famiglia fuori dal matrimonio, Carocci, Roma.
  • Books: Simonetta Piccone Stella e Luca Salmieri, (2016), Convivere in Italia. La famiglia fuori dal matrimonio, Carocci, Roma.


• Orazio Giancola e Luca Salmieri, (2020), Sociologia delle disuguaglianze Teorie, metodi, ambiti, Carocci, Roma. I capitoli 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10.
  • Books: Orazio Giancola e Luca Salmieri, (2020), Sociologia delle disuguaglianze Teorie, metodi, ambiti, Carocci, Roma. I capitoli 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10.