RN13 - Sociology of Families and Intimate Lives

The purpose of RN13 Sociology of Families and Intimate Lives is to promote, encourage, sustain and support research on families and intimate lives of high quality within and between countries in the European context. RN13 also connects scholars, researchers and PhD students interested in research on families and intimate lives, particularly by regularly organising conferences and publications. It fosters the European scientific discourse and the exchange of ideas and results. Research topics within the theme of “families and intimate lives” are for example: family forms and their change in historical time or across the life-course, couple formation and marriage markets, marriage and cohabitation, multi-local families, multicultural and transnational families, same sex couples and LGBT parenting (“rainbow families”), family planning and fertility, infertility and reproductive technologies, work-family balance and work-family conflicts, gender differences and gender relations, parenting and parent child relations, mothering practices, fathering practices, family dissolution and post-divorce families, intergenerational relationships and kinship networks, elder care, cultural understandings of family, family policies and interventions, theories and methodologies of research on families, families in particular contexts such as disability and ill-health, poverty, domestic violence, or migration.

ESA RN 13 has a standing cooperation with the Journal of Family Research (JFR, http://www.journal-of-family-research.eu/), which is peer reviewed, open acccess, indexed in SSCI, and demands no fees.  The JFR editorial board encourages family researchers to submit their manuscripts to the journal. Further, RN13 members regularly guest edit special issues on topics of interest. Currently, two special issues are under way: “Labor market, families and public policies shaping gender and parenting”, guest edited by Almudena Moreno Mínguez, Pedro Romero Balsas, and Inga Laß, and “Family lives during the COVID-19 pandemic in European societies”, guest edited by Ulrike Zartler, Katarzyna Suwada, and Michaela Kreyenfeld.