family grouping

plural family groupings

1. countableThe method in which individuals are grouped together into families that live together.

   This strategy of family grouping and sharing of responsibilities appears to be designed to enable coati mothers to devote more time to searching for food, rather than having to individually protect their young.

   1995, David Stone, Raccoons and Their Relatives, →ISBN, page 10

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   This close family grouping may be a fairly recent development, for Lang and Tastevin (1937, p. 70) report that the Mwila once lived in villages of fifteen or twenty families consisting of approximately one hundred people and that, at the time they were writing, five or six families still grouped around a chief.

   1963, Alvin W. Urquhart, Patterns of Settlement and Subsistence in Southwestern Angola

   Frude's (1990) discussion of the psychological definition of family, further elaborated in Chapter 2, accords well with family nursing, in that it recognises the non-traditional family groupings such as cohabiting couples, blended families, homosexual couples and any variations on traditional family groupings which may be encountered when working with families from cultures other than that of the host country.

   2002, Dorothy Whyte, Explorations in Family Nursing, →ISBN, page 7

   However, cross-cultural studies have found that the nuclear family is more a feature of modern Euro-American society than a universal reality. Subsequently another view gained ground: the really universal family grouping is the mother and her children, often called the matri-central cell.

   2004, Cheris Kramarae, Dale Spender, Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women, →ISBN

2. countableA group of individuals who are related by blood and/or by marriage.

   The intervention can also be interpreted as drawing the youngster into the boundaries of the family grouping and as giving him greater power in that situation because of the attention and company he received.

   2014, Alan S. Gurman, David P. Kniskern, Handbook Of Family Therapy, →ISBN

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   Indeed, viewing Jewish women by family formation and moving from the more mature family groupings to the youngest family groupings, the data indicate a dramatic decline in employment in clerical and technical capacities and a corresponding increase in those employed in professional capacities.

   1994, Steven Bayme, Gladys Rosen, The Jewish Family and Jewish Continuity, →ISBN, page 16

   The three sorts of tensions discussed here, then, generally elicit open resistance only when one family grouping is thought to be favored or disfavored over others. In such cases, the spokesperson for the family grouping generally approaches the foreman with the family's grievance.

   1996, Miriam J. Wells, Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture

3. countableA group of family members who are posed together.

   In November of 1978, my mother-in-law gave me a box of old photos, one of which was a family grouping taken ca. 1892.

   1997, Henry Z. Jones, More Psychic Roots, →ISBN

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   I've actually organized 100 people in a family grouping on catering hall steps! If you're faced with shooting a 100-person family, the quality of the posing isn't the issue, as long as the photograph is sharp and centered.

   2005, Steve Sint, Wedding Photography: Art, Business & Style, →ISBN, page 67

   I feel certain, looking back, that we must have walked through someone's family grouping at the exact moment the shutter closed; surely, some father wielding a video camera must have captured us somewhere, climbing into a teacup or reading the gravestones outside the Haunted Mansion, while his children, fidgety and drunk with excitement, ran around people's legs in the foreground.

   2012, Carolyn Parkhurst, Lorelei's Secret, →ISBN, page 10

4. countableA taxonomic grouping at the family level.

   The deer family grouping is Cervidae, spelled without italics and pronounced SERV-ee-dah.

   2013, Leonard Lee Rue, Whitetail Savvy, →ISBN

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   To a large extent the grouping is built up from partially facial characters, and I am not at all surprised to find Palæntologists offering suggestions, or making re-arrangements of the family grouping. The family Cerioporidæ is particularly obnoxious, for there is not the least affinity between the Spiropora of Haime, and the Heteroporella of Busk.

   1887, Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society - Volume 9, page 353

   Alternatively, once the genus or family grouping is known, you may prefer to look up the distribution maps for that particular group and then list the species known in the area from which your specimen comes.

   2014, Harold Cogger, Reptiles and Amphibians of Australia, →ISBN

5. countableA group of related items.

   The stitches in each family grouping are explained in order of progressive difficulty.

   2012, Marion Nichols, Encyclopedia of Embroidery Stitches, Including Crewel, →ISBN, page viii

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   Just as an atom is a grouping of sub-atomic particles, and an organ or organism is a family grouping of cells, so also is 'the soul' a family grouping of selves.

   2007, Peter Wilberg, Tantric Wisdom for Today's World - The New Yoga of Awareness, →ISBN

   The individual members of the cytochrome P450 superfamily are referred to using the nomenclative CYP (for the superfamily) plus a number identifying a family grouping of isozymes with a more than 40% homology of amino acid sequences (e.g., CYP2).

   2010, Christopher M. Bono, Diana D. Cardenas, Frederick S. Frost, Spinal Cord Medicine, →ISBN, page 302

6. uncountableThe strategy of putting related inventory items together.

   Is family grouping applied in storage with the objective of making processes efficient?

   2012 -, Riccardo Manzini, Warehousing in the Global Supply Chain, →ISBN

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   Effective item placement can often be achieved through tying both the inventory stratification and family grouping approaches together.

   2011, Max Muller, Essentials of Inventory Management, →ISBN, page 79

   The family grouping method allows the storer to handle products that have different storage characteristics.

   2013, Kenneth B. Ackerman, Practical Handbook of Warehousing, →ISBN, page 170

7. UKuncountableThe system of grouping children of differing ages together, used primarily at the preschool level.

   When doing so, he gave his head teachers ownership of how they ran their schools, encouraging them to adopt an approach to teaching similar to the infant school “family grouping” practices, which were getting a lot of publicity in education circles.

   2012, John Paull, Through My Eyes: On Becoming a Teacher, →ISBN, page 136

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   Family grouping, as Elsa Ferri pointed out in her study of combined nursery centres (Ferri etal., 1981), similarly carries an element of wishful thinking. What could be less like the average family in the 1990s than up to ten shildren of different ages spending all day in the same room in the charge of one or two young nursery workers?

   2004, Elinor Goldschmied, Sonia Jackson, People Under Three: Young Children in Day Care, →ISBN, page 24

   As Mindel (1995) has noted, use of a “family grouping model” in child care, in which small cross-age groups stay together with the same child care professional during their entire time in child care, benefits children through the grade school years. How many more benefits could be seen in family grouping models staffed by teachers trained on attachment relationship building?

   2012, Susanne A. Denham, Rosemary Burton, Social and Emotional Prevention and Intervention Programming for Preschoolers, →ISBN