Keywords

Family change, families, interspecies family, families of choice, human animal relationships, society and animals, gender and animals, parenting, family form, family narratives, pets, companion animals

Abstract

Families are conceptualized and accomplished in increasingly diverse ways in the 21st century. A constructionist framework was utilized to examine a widespread contemporary family form, the interspecies family. This mixed-method approach relied on both quantitative survey data and qualitative interview data. First, survey data from the 2006 Constructing the Family Survey were analyzed to understand who in America counts pets as family. Many social demographics were associated and predicted counting pets as family but gender was one of the strongest associations. However, marital status moderated the relationship between gender and counting pets as family at a statically significant level. Men who are currently or have ever been married are less likely to count pets as family than never married men. Second, I conducted 32 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 39 people during 2014-2015 in Central Florida to understand how people who count their cats and dogs as family members narrate this process. Narrative strategies documenting exactly how cats and dogs become family members within interspecies family narratives include: time-related narratives, timeless narratives, and patchwork narratives. Additionally, all participants considered their cats and dogs family but only some of them felt like pet-parents. Narratives of childless participants are compared with narratives of parents to examine the impact of family form on the construction of pet parenting narratives. Implications for the family change literature are discussed.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2015

Semester

Fall

Advisor

Grauerholz, Liz

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

Sociology

Degree Program

Sociology

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0005984

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0005984

Language

English

Release Date

December 2015

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

Subjects

Dissertations, Academic -- Sciences; Sciences -- Dissertations, Academic

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Included in

Sociology Commons

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