Integrating social identity theory and family systems theory to explain how sociocultural norms become family life

Résumé fourni par la source

A persistent challenge in cultural family psychology is explaining how publicly circulating expectations about respectability, marriage, achievement, and filial duty become rules, resource conditions, and emotional climates within particular households. This theoretical and methodological article develops a bounded integration of Social Identity Theory (SIT) and Bowen’s Family Systems Theory (FST). The model specifies four linked propositions: sociocultural norms acquire identity and reputational significance; family members with unequal authority and resources translate those stakes into domestic rules and responses; the relational effects of those responses depend on negotiability, material dependence, and structural position; and family experiences can reproduce, soften, or contest the original norm. Three extended illustrations from an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) study of five parents and five adult children in Mauritius examine conditional support, an age-linked adulthood checklist, and marriage endogamy. Each illustration combines convergent material with counter-examples or qualifying cases and integrates gendered authority, classed access to resources, ethnoreligious boundary-making, and heteronormativity into the analysis itself. The article also documents participant characteristics, recruitment, interview procedures, idiographic analysis, negative-case decisions, reflexive safeguards, and an extract-to-theme audit trail. The excerpts establish the analytic plausibility and limits of the framework; they do not demonstrate prevalence, causality, or validation of a universal model. The proposed integration is therefore offered as a context-sensitive analytic strategy requiring fuller empirical and comparative testing.