Merging cultural and psychological accounts of family contexts

This chapter aims at integrating psychological and cultural analyses of families with their impact. It does so by first focusing on shared ways of specifying the contexts that families provide. Three main ways are identified. These are descriptions in terms of activities and practices, the presence of shared and unshared views, and the nature of interconnections among people and among situations. These views of contexts are then linked to policies that aim at changing contexts, changing people, or changing the skills and knowledge that people bring to various contexts: changing especially their understanding of transitions, pathways, the role of the state, and the cultural models they are likely to encounter.