The life styles include different roles and role combinations like citizens, employee, parent, spouse etc. These roles are developed and nurtured in the family. These roles help the individuals to define the relationship to the family members, surrounding community and the world and adjust themselves accordingly. These role combinations shared by a group of people are termed as life styles. Feldman and Thiebar have said that the life style involves a central life focus such as rearing children, employment and community participation.
Family plays a dominant role in defining the life style in the society. Family is defined as two or more persons living together who are related to each other by blood, marriage or adoption and who are economically and emotionally interdependent. All family members play an important role in developing a family life style. There may be more than one life style within a family depending upon the roles each individual performs.
Ex: If the women has to look after the family and engage herself in employment her life style and that of her family differs from a similar family in which a women is a full time housewife.
Life styles of nuclear families are different from the families having grandparents/joint families.
Single parent families will have a different lifestyle.
These examples help us to understand the type of family and the life styles each family adopts. The life styles serve as background to study the managerial situations and the problems each individual and family faces to achieve a particular quality of life.
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