1. How does Rubin conduct her study of working-class families? Who are the subjects of Families on the Fault Line and how were they studied? How can a professor from Berkeley possibly understand the complex issues facing the people of the working-class?
2. What is it about Families on the Fault Line that makes it a sociological study rather than a psychological one? Describe the relationship between the concepts: class, race, and ethnicity? Which is the most important in explaining the life experiences of the people described in Rubin's Families on the Fault Line?
3. What are some of the differences in the working-class families that Lillian Rubin studied in 1994 and those she interviewed twenty years earlier? In you answers include references to the people's financial situation and their attitudes concerning marriage, divorce, sex, and abortion.
4. Why are the people of the working-class invisible and voiceless people according to Rubin? What seem to be the biggest differences between working class and middle-class family life as described in Families on the Fault Line?
5. What is meant by the phrase "hidden injuries of class?" In what ways are working-class people "trapped" by their social position in ways most upper middle-class couples are not? In what ways do the people in working-class families live on a "fault line that threatens to open up and engulf them at any moment?"

Go to Part II: The Family and the Economy

Go to Part III: Race and the Rise of Ethnicity

Go back to SOCIOLOGY 260 -- Sociology of Marriage and the Family Discussion Questions

If you have any questions or comments please email:

leming@stolaf.edu

Disclaimer