Family and Community: Roles, Relationships and Resources
Family and Community: Roles, Relationships and Resources examines how families organise roles, maintain relationships and use limited resources. The exam tests definitions, classification of family types and resources, and the management process applied to family decisions.
Family and roles
Family types include nuclear (parents and children), joint (several generations or married siblings sharing a household) and extended (relatives beyond the nuclear unit). Roles may be ascribed by birth, age or sex, or achieved through choice and effort. Relationships are consanguineous when based on blood ties and affinal when based on marriage. Healthy family functioning depends on communication, shared responsibilities and respect, not fixed gender stereotypes.
Resources and management
Resources are human (time, energy, knowledge, skills, attitudes) or non-human (money, materials, equipment, community facilities). Management follows planning, organising, implementing and evaluating. A family identifies goals, lists resources, chooses a plan, acts on it and checks whether the goal was met.
Worked example
A family wants to care for an elderly grandparent while both parents work. Human resources include the grandparent's self-care ability, the parents' time and a neighbour's willingness to help; non-human resources include money for a caregiver and proximity to a clinic. The plan might combine morning help, telephonic check-ins and weekend family care. Evaluation asks whether safety, companionship and cost targets were met.
Traps
Money is non-human; time and energy are human. Joint family is not simply a large nuclear family. Roles are not the same as relationships. Do not assume one family form is always better; assess function, resources and context.