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Conflicting perspectives: his and her divorce -- Beyond anger: pain, longing, fear, guilt, and grief -- Grieving divorce: the leaver and the left -- Renegotiating relationships I: separating marital and parental roles -- Renegotiating relationships II: two-parent divorced families -- Divorce and custody law: perfect problems, imperfect solutions -- Negotiating agreements I: setting the stage and the first mediation session -- Negotiating agreements II: identifying issues, brainstorming options, and drafting parenting plans -- Mediation research: a 12-year randomized study.

In this article, the authors merge the study of support, strain, and ambivalence in family relationships with the study of stress to explore the ways family members provide support or contribute to strain in the disaster recovery process. The authors analyze interviews with 71 displaced Hurricane Katrina survivors, and identify three family relationships that were especially important to postdisplacement experiences: marital or intimate partner, parent–adult child, and fictive kin. These relationships provided support, contributed to strain, or did both, highlighting the complexity of such relationships in the postdisaster context. Women tended to provide more support to and receive more support from family relationships than did men, especially through mother–adult daughter relationships.

This article examines how women became involved in credit dealings and often in legal action as the result of family relationships between 1300 and 1620. It argues that women's own personal standing and that of their family underlay their ability to function successfully in a world of financial credit that was based upon delayed obligations. It shows also that women displayed considerable knowledge of economic and legal systems as they attempted to pursue their rights or those of a relative. These observations force one to question any assumption that women's position within the family was uniformly characterized by deference or reliance upon others.

There have been two main arguments concerning the effects of family relationships on social trust. The first claims that the intensity of the family relationship reduces the capacity of the family members to interact in the outside world, where social uncertainty prevails. The second considers that trust inside the family spills over into trust in strangers. There is a corollary to the first argument: intense family relationships, by reducing social trust, affect community development negatively. In this article, I show, first, that it is the intensity of family relationships, and not trust in the family, that negatively affects social trust, and, second, that there is an interaction effect between trust in the family and state efficacy on social trust. While high trust in the family and low trust in strangers can go together, the relationship is spurious. It is low state efficacy that causes low trust in strangers and, to a lesser extent, high in-family trust. These arguments are tested with a sample of 44 countries from the 2005 wave of World Value Surveys.

Research has demonstrated how families are constituted through every day practices of care and emotional investment. In this article I suggest that a mixed methods qualitative approach can add another dimension to sociological understandings of these processes. The integration of different qualitative methods produces a dynamic account of everyday family relationships and experiences of intimacy. It shows how the biographical, experiential and social are interwoven, enabling the fabric of family relationships to be unpicked. Drawing on original data from empirical research, I outline the kinds of material produced by different methods and the usefulness of creativity in research design, including innovative methods such as the emotion map and psycho-social approaches to research. Through case study analysis, I demonstrate how the mixing of methods generates multilayered, richly textured information on family relationships but I caution against tidying up all the empirical loose ends. I suggest that there is analytical benefit in retaining some of the 'messiness' that comprises connected lives.