Ban, A.W., van den

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Ban, van den, A.W.

NARCIS 

Family structure and modernization

Wageningen Yield 

not assume that, where they encounter resis-
tance to change, they are dealing simply with 
irrational attachment to outworn values. Expla-
nations in terms of the traditions of the society 
are probably beside the point. The more Afri-
can nistory is explored, the more it seems that 
—as anywhere in the world—societies have 
been adapting and changing as far back as 
knowledge reaches. To blame resistance to in-
novation on conservatism only evades the need 
to explain. Where people refuse to accept eco-
nomic innovations, it is likely to be because the 
collective risk is too great. 
At the same time, very radical changes in so-
cial structure will not necessarily lead to a 
readier response to opportunity. The creation of 
a settled, wage-earning, urban population is, for 
instance, a characteristic consequence of mod-
ernization. But, as it consolidates, it will proba-
bly develop values far more hostile to individ-
ual ambition than at present pervade African 
society. As the new middle class pass their edu-
cational advantage on to their children, the rest 
of society will draw in upon itself in compensa-
AT IS often assumed that modernization takes 
place less rapidly in extended family households 
than in nuclear family households.1 Some peo-
ple even called the extended family households 
"traditional households."2 However, most au-
thors do not consider it necessary to give empir-
ical evidence for this opinion. In this research 
note we will summarize some empirical studies 
* This article is a revision of some pages from Boer en 
lMibottwvootlichting; de commtmicatie van nieutve land-
bouuimeihoden (The Communication of New Farm Practices 
in the Netherlands), Assen, Van Gorcum, 1963, 279 pp. 
** A.W. van den Ban is Professor of Extension Educa-
tion at the Agricultural University in Wageningen, Nether-
lands. 
•E.g., H. Becker, "Processes of Secularization: An 
Ideal-Typical Analysis," Sociological Review, 24 (1932), 
pp. 141, 143; G. German!, "Secularizaci<5n y Desarollo 
Economico," in •Resistenc'sas & Mudanca, Rio de Janeiro: 
Centro Latino-Americano de Pesquisas em Cicncias Socials, 
1960, pp. 261-279; and S. Groenman and H. Schreuder, 
"Ommen," Verslagen Landbouwkundige Onderzoeiingen, 
35.19, Den Haag, 1949, p. 75. 
a G . A. Kooy and E. W. Hofstce, "Traditional house-
holds and neighbour-group," Transactions of the 3rd World 
Congress of Sociology, Amsterdam, 1956. 
tion, emphasizing loyalty at the expense of 
achievement. And as plans of economic de-
velopment advance some regions of the country 
to the neglect of others, the backward commu-
nities may turn their backs on a nation which 
offers them so little, seeing in economic innova-
tion nothing but a final blow to their self-re-
spect. They may then, indeed, invent a myth of 
their traditional greatness: the attachment to 
tradition may be, after all, not a cause but a 
consequence of economic stultification. 
These discursive illustrations suggest, then, 
that resistance to change cannot be traced to 
family structure. Fundamentally similar struc-
tures may accommodate very divergent attitudes 
towards individual achievement, and these atti-
tudes will reflect, not an autonomous tradition 
of kinship obligation, but a contemporary calcu-
lation of the risk to the security of the group as 
a whole of the economic aspirations of its mem-
bers. The outcome is likely to be a subtle bal-
ance between the economic insurance which 
personal possession and mutual obligation each 
can provide. 
which show that extended family households do 
not lag behind nuclear family households in the 
same villages in adoption of new farm prac-
tices, new attitudes towards the use of credit, or 
opiniateness on events in the outside world. 
There are two reasons why one assumes that 
extended families will be less prone to adopt 
new ideas than nuclear families. One is that in 
extended family households the older genera-
tion has much power in the decision-making 
process and prevents the more innovative 
younger generation from adopting new ideas. 
However, it is not yet sure that age is always 
closely related to innovativeness. Rogers and 
Stanfield3 found, in only 51 out of 158 publica-
tions in which this relationship was studied, 
that younger people are more innovative. An-
other reason is that in the process of moderniza-
tion of society the proportion of extended f ami-
»E. M, Rogers and J. D. Stanfield, Adoption and Dif-
fusion of New Products: Emerging Generalization and Hypoth-
eses, mimeograph, Department of Communication, Michigan 
State University, East Lansing, Michigan, 1966. 
Family Structure and Modernization* 
A. W. VAN DEN BAN** 
Although many people believe that persons living in extended families or in families with a 
high degree of familism are slow to adopt innovations, there is no empirical evidence that 
this is true. 
November 1967 JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY 771 
ly households is gradually decreasing and one 
assumes that families which modernize in one 
aspect, such as in family structure, will also 
modernize in other aspects, such as adoption of 
new ideas. This hypothesis sounds plausible, 
but has to be proven. 
Van den Ban* studied the modernization of 
agriculture in 22 Dutch villages. In five of these 
villages there was a sizable number of farm 
families in his sample which consisted of at 
least one member of another generation than 
the parents and children, usually one of the 
grandparents. In these villages he compared the 
nuclear and the extended (three-generation) 
family households on three indices for modern-
ization of agriculture, viz., adoption of recom-
mended farm practices, judgment on the quality 
of farm management by the local extension 
officer, and the frequency of contact with this 
extension officer. All differences between nu-
clear and extended family households were 
small, and only nine of the 15 differences 
studies (five villages X three indices) indicated 
that the nuclear families had a more modern 
agriculture. 
Benvenuti5 studied this problem in a Dutch 
community where only 43 percent of the farm 
families lived in nuclear households. His mea-
sure for modernization was the ability of the 
head of the household to give a meaningful or 
sensible answer on ten opinion questions on 
current issues, such as: "What do you think of 
the initiatives taken by the Dutch political par-
ties for the farmer's interests?" He could prove 
that farmers who gave an answer to most of 
these questions were in many respects more 
modernized than those who failed to answer 
them. However, he did not find a significant 
difference between the heads of nuclear and of 
extended family households with this opiniate-
ness scale.6 
Fliegel7 studied in an agriculturally less pros-
perous part of Pennsylvania the difference in 
attitude towards credit between farmers in nu-
clear families and farmers who lived with their 
parents in one household. Probably this attitude 
toward the use of credit is related to many other 
aspects of the modernization of the farm enter-
prise. He found in nuclear families that only 23 
percent of the farmers had a positive attitude 
*A. W. van den Ban, "Enkele kenmerken en eigenschap-
pen van de vooruitstrevende boeren II," Bulletin 10 Ajd. 
Sociologie en Sociografie, Wageningen, 1938. 
" B. Benvenuti, Farming in Cultural Change, Assen: van 
Gorcum, 1961. 
"Ibid., p. 303. 
' F. C. Fliegel, "Traditionalism in the Family and Tech-
nological Change," Rural Sociology, 27 (1962), pp. 70-76. 
TABLE 1. PERCENTAGE OF FARM OPERATORS 
WHO HAVE OTHER RELATIVES THAN 
SONS ON THEIR FARMS, ACCORDING TO 
THEIR ADOPTION OF FARM PRACTICES 
Adoption Category 
Low 
Medium Low 
Medium high 
High 
Percent Number 
with of 
Relatives Observations 
14 49 
16 44 
26 44 
24 27 
towards the use of credit, whereas this percent-
age was 54 if both parents of the farmer were 
present in the household. 
Somewhat similar results were found by 
Galjart8 near Rio de Janeiro in Brazil (see 
Table 1). These relatives were not only fathers, 
but mainly cousins, sons-in-law, etc. 
Why has the expected correlation between 
family structure and modernization not been 
found more clearly in these four studies? A 
possible explanation could be that nuclear fami-
lies are less prevalent on large farms than on 
small farms.9 In two studies the relationship has 
been studied for different farm si2e categories 
separately,10 and there also no indication at all 
was found that nuclear families are more mod-
ern than extended families. 
Fliegel11 finds some indications for an inter-
esting hypothesis. It is possible that the man who 
lives in one family with his father has to play 
the role of a "boy" and therefore has more in-
novative attitudes than a man of the same age 
whose parents live elsewhere and who therefore 
has to play the role of an adult. However, this 
cannot explain the findings from the Nether-
lands, where usually the older generation was 
interviewed. 
FAMILISM 
Related to the difference between nuclear and 
extended family households is probably a di-
mension often called familism, which indicates 
the relative concentration of efforts of the fami-
ly towards the achievement of group as opposed 
to individual ends.12 It is often assumed that 
S B. F. Galjart, Itaqui: Old habits and new practices in 
a Brazilian land settlement schemes, manuscript, Department 
of Non-western Sociology, Agricultural University, Wagenin-
gen, 1967. 
'Benvenuti, op. cit., p. 302; and I. K. Sen, "Family 
in four Indian Villages," Man in India, 45 (1965), p. 11. 
10
 Benvenuti, op. cit., p. 303; and Fliegel, op. cit., p. 74. 
11
 Fliegel, Ibid. 
U F . C. Fliegel, "A Multiple Correlation Analysis of 
Factors Associated with Adoption of Farm Practices," Rural 
Sociology, 21 (1956), p. 287. 
772 JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY November 1967 
this dimension also retards the adoption of in-
novations, because it decreases with moderniza-
tion of society, and because other than economic 
motives are involved in the decision whether or 
not one will adopt these innovations. Contrary 
to his expectation, Wilkening18 found in a 
Wisconsin study a slightly positive relationship 
between familism and the adoption of some in-
novations. In a restudy of his data, using partly 
different questions for the familism index, 
Fliegel14 found a low, but significant, negative 
correlation-coefficient (—0.198). 
Ramsey, Poison, and Spencer15 studied this 
relationship between the adoption of recom-
mended farm practices and a familism scale and 
also with scales for 11 other values among dairy 
farmers in New York State. In measuring fam-
ilism they asked, e.g., whether the farmer in 
moving would try to move close to his relatives 
and whether in rearing children one considers 
teaching them that respect for their parents is 
very important. The null hypothesis, that there 
is no relationship between familism and adop-
tion, could not be rejected. 
In a study near Calcutta, India, Bose16 used a 
11E. A. Wilkening, "Adoption of Improved Practices as 
Related to Family Factors," Research Bulletin 183, Wiscon-
sin Agricultural Experiment Station, 1953. 
14
 Fliegel, ' 'A Multiple Correlation Analysis of Factors 
Associated with Adoption of Farm Practices," op. c'tt., p. 
289. 
15
 C. E. Ramsey, R. A. Poison, and G. E. Spencer, "Val-
ues and the Adoption of Practices," Rural Sociology, 24 
(1959), PP. 35-47. 
J.HE sociological concern with social change 
has frequently focused on the relation between 
"modernism" and family structure in tradition-
* This is an expanded version of a paper read at the 
meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society, spring, 1964. 
The research was supported by grants from the American 
Philosophical Society and Wellesley College. 
** Barllett H. Stoodley, LL.B., Ph.D., is Professor of 
Sociology and Chairman of the Department of Sociology and 
Anthropology, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts. 
familism scale and five other attitude scales. For 
his Likert-type familism scale, he used state-
ments such as: "Living in a joint family is bet-
ter than in a nuclear family." Nearly all his re-
spondents were near the extreme familism end 
of his scale, and this might have been the reason 
that he found hardly any correlation of this 
scale with the adoption of farm practices and 
with the other attitude scales. 
Again the evidence that familism is an im-
portant factor in the adoption of innovations is 
quite meager. One reason can be the correlation 
between familism and farm size,17 but no nega-
tive correlation between familism and adoption 
of innovations has been found after controlling 
for farm size. Another reason might be that the 
ends of the family as a group are not always op-
posed to the individual ends of the family 
members. A vivid description of some ways in 
which family connections can be used for per-
sonal goals is given by Leeds.18 
CONCLUSION 
Our understanding of the effect of the family 
structure on the adoption of innovations by the 
family and on their acceptance of modem atti-
tudes is quite limited. It is hoped that this note 
will stimulate some more research in this field. 
18
 S. P. Bose, "Peasant Values and Innovations in India," 
American Journal of Sociology, 67 (1962), pp. 552-560. 
"Wilkening, op. cit., p. 33. 
" A . Leeds, "Brazilian Careers and Social Structure: An 
Evolutionary Model and Case History," American Anthro-
pologist, 66 (1964), pp. 1321-1347. 
al societies.1 William J. Goode has modulated 
the rather determinist views of the functional-
1
 See Talcott Parsons, "Revised Analytical Approach to 
the Theory of Social Stratification," Class, Status, and Power: 
A Reader in Social Stratification, ed. by R. Bendix and 
S. M. Lipset, New York: The Free Press, a division of the 
MacMillan Co., 1953, p. 92; Eugene Litwak, "Occupational 
Mobility and Extended Family Cohesion," American Socio-
logical Review, 25 (I960), pp. 9-21; also, his "Geographic 
Mobility and Family Cohesion," American Sociological Re-
Normative Family Orientations of Chinese College 
Students in Hong Kong* 
BARTLETT H. STOODLEY** 
A random sample of Chinese college students are interviewed with reference to family norms. 
The data suggest that the younger generation, while adopting the Western norm of individual 
choice in marriage, observe proprieties of parental respect and Confucian tradition while only 
partially accepting Western norms of dating and romantic love. This movement toward an 
extended family type may, in the light of American studies, be functional in the urban context. 
November 1967 JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY 773 


Family structure and modernization

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