An exploration of family life in Chile: practices, social class and gender
Author: Isabel Nunez-Salazar, isabel.nunezsa@gmail.com
Department: Sociology
University: University of Warwick, United Kingdom
Supervisor: Nickie Charles
Year of completion: 2020
Language of dissertation: English
Keywords:
Families
, Inequalities
, Gender
, Sexuality
Areas of Research:
Family Research
, Stratification
, Visual Sociology
Abstract
This research involves the understanding of intimacy practices as well as everyday life of people in Santiago de Chile through the intersectionality insight of social class, gender and sexuality. I am interested in daily life among different family forms such as same-sex couples, people living apart together (LAT), married couples, cohabiting couples, single mothers and fathers, divorced and separated families, people living by their own, people living in shared houses and stepfamilies. My study aims to comprehend how people’s lives have changed and persisted over time in Chile in postdictatorship. Studying families in Chile is a crucial issue due to the fact that families are one of the mechanism by which individuals obtain opportunities and gain access to society. In addition, families are one of the place by which individuals have social mobility and access to social capital, as a consequence, these are a social group in which social inequalities are embedded and (re)produced. Researching family practices allows me to comprehend people’s lives in an active way which contributes a broad understanding of family life and sociology of families.
My research is a qualitative approach based on mixed methods in family research, incorporating 50 in-depth interviews, visual methods (family photographs) and observations within the households (micro ethnography). I conducted my fieldwork in Santiago, Chile for a period of 10 months.
