Title:	Family Fictions and Family Facts
Authors:	Brian P. Cooper
Keywords:	Family Facts
Issue Date:	2007
Publisher:	Routledge
Description:	This chapter introduces the themes and methods that I use to investigate how Martineau and her contemporaries in Britain approached these questions. I pursue three main areas of inquiry. The first involves the efforts of Martineau and her contemporaries to define different kinds of families and family behavior in order to further social inquiry about the relationships between individuals, families, and populations. These are issues of classification, of how to aggregate and disaggregate, and how to relate the parts to the whole. Contemporaries used two principal methods, representative types and statistical aggregates, to “sum up.” We like to think of the methods as incompatible ways of generating knowledge: Hacking calls Frederick Le Play’s use of representative households in his budget studies “antistatistical” (Hacking 1990: 133–41). But, just as novelists used government blue books as inspiration for their heroes and villains, social statisticians such as the Belgian Adolphe Quetelet tried to endow statistical aggregates with the attributes of real, if idealized people (Cooper and Murphy 2000).
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/56174
ISBN:	0–203–44185–0
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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