Reflexivity: A Crucial Resource for the Challenge of Family Well-Being

In contemporary sociology, reflexivity stands as a peculiar character of the post-modern man, strictly connected with the individualization of biographies and the growing of the risk and uncertainty. This situation affects unavoidably the couple and family relationships: whereas an individualized reflexivity prevails, building we-ness in couple relation and meeting the challenge of family well-being become more and difficult. In this chapter, it will be hypothesized that there is also a different kind of reflexivity, relationship-based, rather than individual-based, that limits the damages of individualization, facilitating a couple to build we-ness and to pursue the we-relation’s well-being (a relational good). At the end, a polysemic concept of couple relational reflexivity will be provided and some methods to empirically study reflexivity will be proposed.