Behavioral Ecology of the Family: Harnessing Theory to Better Understand Variation in Human Families

Paula Sheppard and Kristin Snopkowski
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Paula Sheppard: School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6PE, UK
Kristin Snopkowski: Department of Anthropology, Boise State University, Boise, ID 83725, USA

Social Sciences, 2021, vol. 10, issue 7, 1-11

Abstract: Researchers across the social sciences have long been interested in families. How people make decisions such as who to marry, when to have a baby, how big or small a family to have, or whether to stay with a partner or stray are questions that continue to interest economists, sociologists, demographers, and anthropologists. Human families vary across the globe; different cultures have different marriage practices, different ideas about who raises children, and even different notions of what a family is. Human behavioral ecology is a branch of anthropology that is particularly interested in cultural variation of family systems and how these differences impact upon the people that inhabit them; the children, parents, grandparents. It draws on evolutionary theory to direct research and generate testable hypotheses to uncover how different ecologies, including social contexts, can explain diversity in families. In this Special Issue on the behavioral ecology of the family, we have collated a selection of papers that showcase just how useful this framework is for understanding cultural variation in families, which we hope will convince other social scientists interested in family research to draw upon evolutionary and ecological insight in their own work.

Keywords: human behavioral ecology; kinship; marriage systems; cross-cultural variation; family formation; cooperation and conflict; cooperative breeding; kin networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
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