Families and relationships e-Special issue introduction

This Families and Relationships e-Special Issue contains a selection of ten papers previously published in Sociology. In this Introduction, we first outline the broader sub-disciplinary context in which the paper contained herein can be located and explain the criteria we used to select them. The increased popularity of families and relationships as a focus of sociological study is reflected in the dominance of papers published in the 1990s and later. Our selection highlights the following developments within the field: the shift from the sociology of the family to a sociology of families; the debates surrounding late modern changes and the individualisation thesis; increased diversity regarding types of family and kinds of issue that have been researched; and continued theoretical development by extending the family practices approach and by widening the scope of study. We include reflections of how the papers in this e-Special Issue speak to developments in the discipline at large and in the field of families and relationships, as well as what the future might hold for the field