| Summary: | <p>Intergenerational relationships have provided a popular focus of enquiry for family sociology. With recent demographic shifts and structural changes in the family, intergenerational relationships have begun to shift throughout the world. Turkey, as a Muslim-majority country with strong traditional intergenerational bonds, is also undergoing demographic transition and structural changes are taking place in Turkish families. For that reason, it is significant to know how intergenerational relationships are affected by these changes. This dissertation aims to understand the nature of intergenerational relationships and how they are affected by socio-demographic factors. The Intergenerational Solidarity Approach by Bengtson and Roberts (1991) is used as the most appropriate theoretical framework for the research objectives and the Turkish context. The results of the quantitative enquiry have revealed that intergenerational solidarity is still strong among Turkish families; however, inconsistency between attitude and behaviour is detected among educated respondents, which has led to another phase of qualitative enquiry. Interviews conducted with adult and older Turkish women show that the gap between normative and felt obligations is putting pressure on educated Turkish women in particular, and that they develop different management strategies to confront the dilemmas they experience. In this respect, the Intergenerational Ambivalence Theory (Lüscher & Pillemer, 1998) is employed to address the findings of qualitative data. The results of both of quantitative and qualitative analysis show that neither the solidarity nor the ambivalence approach is fully capable of reflecting intergenerational relationships in the Turkish context. For this reason, as a final step, the dissertation suggests a theoretical model for examining intergenerational relationships in Turkish families. The suggested model embraces both the solidarity and the ambivalence models and stipulates the use of mixed methodology in intergenerational research. In this respect, this dissertation contributes to empirical, theoretical and methodological knowledge in the literature of intergenerational relationships.</p>
|
|---|