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People from a 'mixed' or 'inter' racial and ethnic background, and people partnering and parenting across different racial and ethnic backgrounds, are of increasing political, public and intellectual interest internationally. Contributors to this interdisciplinary collection interrogate notions of mixedness and mixing, and challenge stereotypical assumptions. They advance debates in the field through illuminating the complexity of specific historical trajectories, administrative practices and lived experience.Recurrent themes woven throughout the chapters include:<

Researching Families and Communities: Social and Generational Change explores the concepts and perspectives that guide research and the methods used to explore change during the last half of the 20th century and into the new millennium. It highlights the complexities of continuities alongside change, the importance of the perspectives that shape investigation, and the need to engage with situated data

This article explores the pseudonyms that UK-based family sociologists have used to refer to and discuss participants in writing up their studies from the post-war to the present day. It takes a sociological and temporal perspective on the conventions for naming research participants in qualitative studies of family life. Drawing on major monographs reporting on studies of family lives across the period, I show that, over time, since the 1950s and 1960s, (pseudo)naming practice has reflected a firm trajectory towards an intimate rather than neutral research relationship, with the use of personal names able to convey a sense of closeness to the particular participant by researchers to the readers. I argue that temporal disciplinary investigatory zeitgeists underpin pseudonym conventions, and that personal names have become the normalised, unspoken standard.

Social capital has become a key concept in Government policy-making and in academic circles. Broadly, social capital concerns norms and networks: the values people hold and the resources that they can access, which both result in and are the result of collective and socially negotiated ties and relationships. Where people share a sense of identity, hold similar values, trust each other and reciprocally do things for each other, then this is felt to have an impact on the social, political and economic nature of the society in which we live. Across the political spectrum, there are concerns that levels of social capital are being eroded in contemporary society.

Children are said to be in need of stability for a 'successful' upbringing. This article focuses on the implications of this for parenting and childrearing practices in step‐families. It addresses the ways that conceptions of stability for children in family policy are tied to a particular family form and to maintaining continuity in biological parenting obligations, while parenting research has largely been concerned with measuring the consequences of changing family forms for children. In contrast, parents and step‐parents in step‐families themselves have far more complex understandings about the creation of stability for children in their care, around issues of dis/continuity in linear time and the social and material substantive constitution of stability. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.