Recent theorizing tends to position ordinary relationships as something we have lost, yet the nature of these relationships is not seriously engaged with. Drawing on rich empirical data, this book questions epochal claims about contemporary emotional lives, setting out to be explicit about the nature of ordinary relationships.

Drawing on research from the Timescapes Study, this volume discusses the life chances and experiences of children and young people, parents and older generations. A unique qualitative longitudinal study forms the basis for the chapter contributions, delivering policy-relevant findings to address individual and family lives over time.

This collection focuses on the real life experiences of conducting emprical research about families and relationships, with an emphasis on the actualities of doing research and the experiences of being a researcher.

Drawing on interviews with UK couples in distance relationships, this book seeks to explain, evaluate and advance sociological debates about intimate life. It provides a rich and human perspective on how bodies, emotions and connections to others are key in maintaining intimate relationships.

Based on interviews undertaken with British Chinese families, this book explores the nature of contemporary British Chinese households and childhood experiences. By speaking to parents and children of each family, using repeat interviews over a nine-month period, accounts of family life are revealed from all generational perspectives.
This book reveals some similarities between the practices of past and contemporary British Chinese households. Carmen Lau-Clayton suggests that Chinese parents (regardless of backgrounds and length of UK residency) not only identify themselves as being...

Everyday Friendship conceptualises the lived experience of intimacy in a world in which the terms and conditions of love and friendship are increasingly unclear. Drawing on writing on friendship, love, and intimacy by such thinkers as Simmel and Kracauer, Elias, Goffman, Luhmann and Honneth, the book charts the modern meaning of intimacy and the freedoms it offers, as well as the continued challenges of entrenched gendered assumptions in everyday relations of affection, trust and respect. It shows that the analysis of the 'small world' of dyads can give important clues about society, and in...

There has been a widespread fascination with age-dissimilar couples in recent years. This book examines how the romantic relationships of these couples are understood. Based on qualitative research, McKenzie investigates notions of autonomy, relatedness, contradiction, and change in age-dissimilar relationships and romantic love.

Who and how we love may be changing but our desire to be in a relationship endures. This book presents an incisive account of how couples experience, understand and sustain long-term relationships, exploring the emotional, practical and biographical resources that couples draw on, across the life course.

This book explores how masculinities and fatherhood are transmitted across family generations of white British, Irish and Polish fathers. Providing unique insights into men's lives, migration, employment, father-son relationships and intergenerational transmission, it offers a rich methodological story of how intergenerational research is done.

Informed by ethnographic research with children, Davies offers new sociological insights into children's personal relationships, as well as closely examining methodological approaches to researching with children and researching relationships.