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This study is a radical interactionist analysis of family conflict. Drawing on both a negotiated order perspective and Athen's theory of complex dominative encounters, this study analyzes the role that domination plays in conflicts among intimates. As the family engages in repeated conflicts over roles, the family also engages in negotiations over the family order, what role each party should play, interpretations of past events, and plans for the future. These conflicts take place against a backdrop of patriarchy that asymmetrically distributes power in the family to determine the family order. The data from this study come from a content analysis of mothers with substance use problems as depicted in the reality television show Intervention. The conflicts in these families reveal that these families develop a grinding family order in which families engaged in repeated conflict but also continued to operate as and identify as a family. These conflicts are shaped by and reinforce patriarchal expectations that mothers are central to family operation. The intervention at the end of each episode offered an opportunity for the family to engage in a concerted campaign to try to force the mother into treatment and reestablish the family order.

The theory of third order inference is a theory of how cultural beliefs influence individuals' decisions under conditions of interdependence and uncertainty. In this study, I build on prior work extending the theory to the role of third order information on social trust in public goods dilemmas. Namely, I argue that when second order information on the beliefs of those relevant to the group task are present, this information should influence decision-making over first and third order.

I test this argument in an experimental public goods game. After measuring first order social trust, participants are randomly sorted into one of four conditions – two that pair third and second order information on social trust as parallel and two that pair them as in conflict.

The results suggest that in the presence of second order information on social trust, third order information doesn't have an effect on cooperation.

The study extends the theory of third order inference to understanding the role of social trust at the first, second, and third levels in public goods dilemmas. It puts second order information in competition with third order in predicting cooperation. It suggests that resolving the uncertainty over the second order beliefs of a collective is key to preventing inefficient equilibriums when second and third order beliefs conflict.

The issue of dropout looms large in the context of school education in India despite various flagship programs that have been initiated in school education. According to U-DISE report (2019–2020), girls drop out more than boys at the upper primary level. An analysis of the dropout problem demands probing deeper into intrahousehold dynamics that involves bargaining at the household level on investment decision. These decisions are often influenced by the social context in which the girl child in the family faces discrimination which gets reflected in terms of dropout of girl children. Apart from the issue of gender, birth order also determines which child is more likely to drop out. Using NSSO data (2017–2018), we observe that not all children of a household are equally susceptible to the dropout problem. Moreover, the eldest sibling is found to be more susceptible to the dropout problem and dropout rate goes down with the other younger siblings in the same household. First-born girl children drop out more than their male counterparts showing gender bias. The chapter concludes that the factors pushing a child to drop out become more effective for the eldest sibling. The major reason is the family structure of India as the eldest sibling is expected to be more responsible and look after other younger siblings. Consequently, a certain number of the younger siblings try to follow the elder siblings and discontinue going to school.

A robust body of scholarship has attached unintended childbearing, cohabitation, and stepfamily living arrangements to a greater risk of union instability in the United States. These aspects of family life, which often co-occur, are overrepresented among disadvantaged populations, who also have an independently higher risk of union instability. Existing scholarship has modeled these family experiences as correlated events to better understand family and union instability, yet the authors assert a direct effort to test whether or how unintended childbearing differs across marital and stepfamily statuses makes important contributions to established research on relationship stability. Drawing on the 2006–2017 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), the authors test potential moderating effects to better understand the linkages between unintended childbearing and union dissolution among 7,864 recent, higher-order births to partnered mothers via discrete-time, event history logistic regression models. Findings confirm that unintended childbearing, cohabitation, and stepfamily status are all linked with a greater risk of dissolution. However, unintended childbearing is differentially linked to instability by marital status, with unintended childbearing being associated with a higher risk of dissolution for married couples relative to cohabiting couples. Unintended fertility does not seem to increase the risk of instability across stepfamily status. Findings provide more evidence in support of selection, rather than causation, in explaining the association between unintended childbearing and union instability among higher-order births. Results suggest that among higher-order births, unintended childbearing may reflect underlying relationship issues.