Research on families with problems in India / edited by Unit for family studies

The family is the basic unit of society and so a basic unit of study in most social science disciplines, whether sociology, psychology, economics, anthropology, social psychiatry or social work. A need was felt for a specia lised research unit on family studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences since the late seventies. Such a unit was finally established at the Institute. in 1984, in the sixth five year plan. This Unit for Family Studies was placed in the teaching Department of Family and Child Welfare, so that, the nec essary exchange between teaching and research could be in-built.

To start with, the scope of this Unit for Family Studies was visualised to be wide, covering areas such as family structure, functions, roles, family life cycle, problems and crisis in the family, marriage and divorce, and wel fare services in the field of family. My colleagues in the Unit, Dr. Murh Desai and Dr. Shalini Bharat, started mapping this scope and exploring the literature within it. A classified card catalogue and an annotated bibliogra phy on the family in India were a result of this. In the process it was felt that more of pure sociological analyses of the Indian family were identified. Very little literature was identified on the psycho-social and other aspects of the Indian family. Also, there was little research available that could be directly fed into teaching of family problems, policies, programmes and practice, that were part of the curriculum of the Department of Family and Child Welfare. It was, therefore, decided to give the Unit the needed thrust of applied research, policy analysis and practice-based research. An inter disciplinary approach was considered imperative for such a thrust. In the past few years research projects undertaken by the Unit have been in the areas of single-parent families, female-headed families, women with health or marital problems, prostitutes, and deprivation of care among their children, child adoption and adoptive families, social action with Muslim women, marriage counselling provided to selected cases at the Bombay City Civil Court, and the two pay-check families. The courses on Family Dynamics and Family Social Work. offered by the Department, were rebuilt and indigenised with reference to relevant Indian research iden tified from different disciplines. In addition, the Unit has undertaken the task of compiling standardised Indian tools to study family variables. In 1986, the Unit brought out a special issue on Family in The Indias Journal of Social Work, published by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Though no special attempt was made in this issue to portray any particular type of family, yet, most of the papers focused on specific problems facing the family, namely, migration, single parenthood, disability of a family member, crisis due to prolonged strikes and lockouts, and generation gap affecting parent-child relationship. After the initial years of exploring the literature, resource building. developing teaching material, undertaking some research and publication in the area of applied family research in different disciplines, our Unit consid ered it necessary to bring the family researchers in different disciplines in India together, through a seminar, to facilitate the exchange of reviews and coordination of research in selected areas and deliberate upon implications and issues, significant for policy making. practice, teaching and further research. A national Seminar was subsequently held by the Unit on research on families with specific problems, from 17- 20 April, 1989. Selected paper's presented at this Seminar have been revised and published in these two volumes.