Shared obliviousness as a family systems phenomenon -- Family system mechanisms for maintaining shared obliviousness -- Family obliviousness to context -- Obliviousness to matters within the family -- Shared obliviousness and family decisions -- Family system responses to threats to obliviousness -- Obliviousness and family therapy -- Researching shared family obliviousness -- Shared obliviousness that is not quite shared or oblivious -- The future of shared family obliviousness
In the past I worked at meeting modernist research standards by carrying out qualitative family research using multiple interviewers. But different interviewers brought back different interview material, and although from a postmodern perspective that is to be expected and can be beneficial, it created several problems. As I have evolved to be more of a postmodern researcher, the modernist standards I once believed in still matter to me, but I now think that, from symbolic interaction, social construction, and other perspectives, single‐interviewer research is legitimate and, in some ways, preferable. But then I have found in my recent interview research that there are good reasons to use more than one interviewer as long as they interview together.
This paper explores a culture and a research method, based on the conjecture that common similes and metaphors in a culture for "family" may offer insights into important aspects of the meanings, values, and ideals connected to family in that culture. With a focus on China, we looked for the first similes and metaphors for family that came up on the two most popular Chinese search engines, Baidu and Google. We winnowed the first hits, eliminating those that were not similes and metaphors and those that were to websites that few other websites linked to. In the end, we had nine Chinese similes and metaphors for family. They include: Family is a gentle harbor, a harbor for all seasons, a haven or refuge, a gas station, the center of the earth, and a little wooden boat on the river. We believe that these figures of speech represent Chinese cultural values that are important to Chinese thinking about families. Included in that, the figures of speech seem to us to represent the centrality of family in a society where for many the help they need will have to come from family. The method of investigating similes and metaphors for family as a way of understanding family in a culture has its risks, including issues of whose reality is reflected on websites and how search engines give priority to what comes up first in a search. But the method also seems worth considering as an addition to other social science tools for illuminating aspects of family life in a culture.
