Chambers concludes A Sociology of Family Life by addressing three interrelated themes: popular notions of a decline in family values, diversity in contemporary intimate relationships and the need to develop a global dimension within sociological approaches to the family.

While research findings repeatedly emphasize the strength and durability of family and intimate ties, Chambers demonstrates that, in the UK and USA, a discourse of ‘family values’ is articulated by politicians, religious leaders and the media to privilege and normalize the ‘nuclear family’ form. She argues that this privileging of a singular and predominantly white middle-class family arises from an ethnocentric perspective on changing family relations. Chambers shows how the idea of a ‘proper family’ is often used as a political football. Family values rhetoric, regularly advanced by US presidents and British prime ministers, forecloses certain kinds of arguments and fuels a media-led backlash against several intimate relationships and households including single mothers, Black mothers, working mothers, absent fathers and lesbian and gay unions.

Addressing such ideological assumptions and misconceptions, Chambers provides a comprehensive re-examination of recent scholarship and identifies relevant concepts for the study of diversity in families and intimate relationships. In particular, she argues for understandings of personal life and family practices that avoid stigma and prejudice yet remain sensitive to the intersections of sexual, ethnic, gender and class identities and inequalities. Finally, she considers the far-reaching consequences for changing family dynamics on the global stage, identifying tensions between traditional and late modern notions of the self that impact upon, for example, approaches to family-based welfare and public welfare.

The impact of Chambers’ work is twofold. First, the book identifies the richness and complexity involved in contemporary intimate relations. Second, it draws attention to significant shortcomings in social policy and a gap between western theories and the realities and constrains of family life in non-western cultures in relation to family planning; arranged and transnational marriages and reproductive technologies; welfare provision for the elderly; the pressures of childcare for post-divorce families.

This book has been selected by Choice as a 2013 Outstanding Academic title.