welcome to this tutor to you sociology topic video on families and households focusing on wilmot and young and the symmetrical family in what's seen as a seminal piece of research sociologist will martin young conducted research in the 1950s and then again in the early 1970s in east london using large-scale social surveys to examine the role of the family they adopted what was called a march of progress view one that suggested that the family had evolved through a series of different stages and would continue to evolve their main concern was with the day-to-day organization of family life how tasks and leisure time were divided they examined class areas as they believed in the principle of stratified diffusion in other words they suggested that the norms and values of the upper classes eventually would drip down to the working classes and that throughout history this had been the case they used this principle to predict how gender roles within the family would evolve and tested their prediction by returning 20 years later in their initial research they suggested that family life had changed in response to changes in society the key social change was the industrial revolution and they highlighted the first two stages of the theory as being family life either side of this event examining the differences between the pre-industrial family and the early industrial family they argued that the family was evolving and that by the 1950s there was a movement towards a third stage of family life the symmetrical family however using the wealthier classes as an example they predicted that family life would move towards a fourth stage that of the asymmetrical family and let's look at those in more detail the first stage where martin young identified was the pre-industrial family prior to the industrial revolution large percentages of the population had lived in rural areas and their daily work revolved around agriculture the family unit operated as a team with all members of the family taking on roles in the fields and in the home the family at this time was a unit of production producing its own goods for consumption and perhaps trading any surplus with others in return for goods and services they could not acquire themselves this changed however with the industrial revolution and the need for families to seek paid employment in the period succeeding the industrial revolution will martin young's second stage of family emerged the early industrial family this was typified by the movement to urban areas such as the newly established industrial towns and cities and looking for employment in manufacturing industries such as textiles rather than working in agriculture as families need to work to earn wages rather than be self-sufficient they became units of consumption exchanging their labor for wages and their wages for goods and services contrary to the ideas of parsons wilmot and young suggested that these families often survived the poverty and high unemployment in the towns and cities to utilizing kinship networks to provide for some of the functions they were unable to fulfill aunts and grandparents would provide childcare whilst men and women went out to work laundry and cooking would be done by relatives that were not employed to aid others often in exchange for food or clothing that the unemployed could not afford wilmot and young suggested that in this era male and female time was separate with females having control over the private sphere usually reinforced by connections with other female relatives their mothers and their sisters whilst males spent most of their time in the public sphere in employment and then spending their leisure time in public houses with work colleagues but by the time wilmot and young conducted their research the family was beginning to shift towards a third stage the symmetrical family developed as society moved into an era of greater prosperity in the post-war period the advent of home leisure activities such as radio and television meant more shared leisure time in the home and the greater social and geographical mobility meant that families had moved away from extended kinship networks to become more self-sufficient and in line with parsons idea of a privatized nuclear family instead of the segregated conjugal roles of the early industrial family wilmot and young found a greater amount of joint conjugal roles and while task was still gendered the family was becoming more symmetrical in its organization outside the home there was a movement towards dual employment however this remained primarily based upon gender stereotypes it was this progress believed to have been diffused from the middle and upper classes that led wilmot and young to theorize a potential fourth stage of family life the asymmetrical nature of upper-class families would eventually work its way down to the lower social classes according to wilmar and young richer families would spend their time apart with females employing domestic labor and socializing with other wives and males choosing to socialize in private clubs or on the golf clubs despite their theory of stratified diffusion holding true in earlier stages wilmot and young were unable to provide evidence of asymmetrical families in their return to east london in 1970s and this remains the case while some separation of larger activities for males and females can be evidenced in contemporary society family life continues to move towards more symmetry than deviate into separate roles with males becoming more involved in children's lives and females more likely to be in paid employment and looking for career progression critics of the symmetrical family suggest that despite the optimistic sounding title the family remained far from symmetrical with women taken on paid employment domestic labor and the emotional burden of the family through what oakley referred to as the jewel burden and duncan marsden later referred to as the triple shift will martin young's ideas of stratified diffusion also doesn't hold up the growth in income inequality in the uk between the elites and the working classes has meant that the lower classes cannot afford to gain access to opportunities in the same way the upper classes can in fact the gap in inequality has meant that the divisions between the two classes are possibly broader than ever before and a final criticism is that like most of the functionist ideas that came before will martin young's research was based upon assumptions of nuclear families and did not examine the broader range of family types that exist in society and so has limited application to contemporary society that concludes this tutorial sociology topic video on families and households looking at the research of wilmot and young into the symmetrical family thanks for watching