Families as They Really Are

Original essays that explore how families operate in everyday life

Drawing on the latest social science research and clinical expertise, Families as They Really Are gets to the heart of what families are, how they work, and why they matter. These original essays by an interdisciplinary community of experts who study and work with families reframes the question about families from “are they breaking down?” to “where are they going, how, and why?” Now encompassing greater diversity in and within family structures, this thoroughly updated Third Edition features expanded coverage of gender, including nonbinary and trans experiences and perspectives; greater representation of families of color and LGBTQ families; and new pieces on the impact of the pandemic on families.

Virginia Rutter has been working at the intersection of academia and media for two decades―first in D.C. in Congress and at a mental health organization, and then as a sociologist translating academic ideas to general audiences. She teaches in the sociology department at Framingham State University and is a member of the board of the Council on Contemporary Families. The author of two books (The Gender of Sexuality and The Love Test, both with Pepper Schwartz) and numerous articles for Psychology Today, Rutter has written on topics including divorce, marriage, gender, sexuality, stepfamilies, adolescence, infidelity, depression, women in science, psychotherapy research, couples therapy, and domestic violence. She has been seen and heard in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, NPR, USA Today, and various liberal and conservative radio programs. She was a co-investigator of the NIH-funded National Couples Survey and a public policy fellow at the National Academy of Sciences.

Kristi Williams is professor and chair of sociology at Ohio State University and a senior scholar at the Council on Contemporary Families. She’s also the former editor of the Journal of Marriage and Family. A family demographer and medical sociologist, Williams studies the influence of union formation, fertility, and other social ties on mental and physical health with attention to gender, race/ethnicity, and life course variations in these processes.

Barbara J. Risman is professor and head of the department of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was previously Alumni Distinguished Research Professor, as well as the Founding Director of the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at North Carolina State University. Risman is the author of Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition and over two dozen journal articles. She is also the president of the board of The Council on Contemporary Families, a national organization whose mission is to bring new research findings and clinical expertise to public attention. In 2005, Risman was honored with the Katherine Jocher Belle Boone Beard Award from the Southern Sociological Society for lifetime contributions to the study of gender. In 2013, she was elected vice president of the American Sociological Association. She is currently testing theories about whether hormonal exposure in utero influences gendered selves in adulthood. Risman strongly believes that sociologists have a responsibility both to do good research and to teach about it in the classroom and to the public at large.