Breaking down the question
The command word here is analyze critically, which asks for more than exposition. You must first state accurately what David Morgan meant by family practices, and then weigh the strengths and limitations of the approach. A purely descriptive account will not satisfy the critical demand.
The specific naming of Morgan means a generic essay on the changing family will miss the mark. His concept is precise: it shifts attention from the family as a fixed institution to family as something people do. Supporting material on how sociologists classify family types is available in the note on the types and forms of family.
How to approach it
Begin with Morgan's central move — treating family as a set of practices rather than a bounded structure. Explain the key features: family as activity, its fluidity, and its location in everyday life. Then turn to critique, balancing the approach's insight into diversity and change against charges that it under-plays structure, power and material inequality. Conclude with a measured verdict.
Model answer
David Morgan, in Family Connections (1996), reconceptualised the sociology of the family by introducing the notion of family practices. Rather than treating the family as a fixed institution with a settled structure, he argued that family is better understood as something people actively do through everyday activities. The family exists in the doing — in cooking a meal, caring for a child, remembering a birthday — rather than as a static entity to which individuals simply belong.
Several features define the approach. First, family is an activity rather than a thing; the emphasis falls on verbs, not nouns. Second, family life is fluid and fragmentary, assembled from routine practices that may cut across households. Third, these practices are everyday and taken for granted, blending into the ordinary flow of life. Fourth, practices are simultaneously historically located and biographically meaningful, connecting individual experience to wider social patterns.
The strengths of this framework are considerable. It captures the growing diversity of contemporary family forms — single-parent households, reconstituted families, cohabitation and same-sex partnerships — without judging them against a nuclear ideal, echoing Judith Stacey's account of the postmodern family. By foregrounding what people do, it accommodates change and avoids the rigidity of earlier functionalist definitions. It also dignifies the informal, affective labour that sustains family life.
Yet the approach invites criticism. By dissolving the family into fluid practices, it risks losing sight of enduring structures of obligation, law and property that shape family life. Feminist critics note that emphasising doing can obscure the unequal distribution of caring labour and the persistence of patriarchal power within households. Materialists argue that practices are constrained by class and economic resources that the concept tends to background. There is also a danger of conceptual over-inclusiveness: if family is whatever people do, the boundaries of the concept become blurred.
On balance, Morgan's contribution is a valuable corrective to static, institution-centred definitions, alerting sociology to the lived, processual character of family life. Its critical utility, however, is fullest when combined with an attention to structure, power and inequality that the practices approach, taken alone, tends to underplay.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners reward candidates who can state Morgan's concept precisely — family as doing rather than being — before evaluating it. Mere paraphrase of family change without naming his specific argument loses the second half of the marks.
The critical dimension is where scripts separate. The best answers pair genuine strengths, such as sensitivity to diversity and change, against sharp limitations drawn from feminist and materialist standpoints regarding power and structure. A crisp, balanced verdict at the close signals the analytical maturity the command word critically explicitly demands.