An exploratory research on family associations in Europe

The family associations have a particular importance in the comprehension of those new social subjectivities that are emerging within an increasingly decentralized social fabric from a point of view not only institutional and economic but also epistemic and civil (Donati 1997, 2015). The research conducted so far leave the question open on the new ways of declination of family associations in a supranational horizon. The last few decades have encountered a process of change and differentiation that has affected on different spheres of the social. In particular, the family structure has been increasing complexity and hit by de-institutionalization processes (Di Nicola, Landuzzi 2004; Rossi, Bramanti 2012). At the same time, the spheres of civil society, with the intensification of multi-level and stratified (glocal) governance, have acquired an increasing weight, until to configure a new model of "social citizenship" (Donati 1993). The correlation of those two factors requires a reflection on the speed and quality of these changes. This paper intends to propose the most significant results of an exploratory research on the associative phenomenon of families in Europe, commissioned by the Institute of Anthropology for the culture of the family and of the person at the University Center for Studies and Research on Family (Catholic University of Sacred Heart, Milan). The research involved 100 family organizations, present in different European countries, through the administration of a questionnaire divided into five thematic blocks concerning: general news on the association, data relating to the compiler, the genesis and history of the organizations, the familiarity matrix of the associations, the value orientation of the associations and the responses fielded by the organizations with respect to the most recent challenges affecting the family. The methodology adopted in the analysis of the data is divided into a quantitative dimension (monovariate and multivariate analysis) and a qualitative dimension (content analysis). The results obtained have been reformulated and re-proposed adopting the guiding distinction: the matrix of the organizations' familiarity and the associative reticularity.