family grouping

Noun

family grouping (countable and uncountable, plural family groupings)

1. (countable) The method in which individuals are grouped together into families that live together.
   • 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...1963, Alvin W. Urquhart, Patterns of Settlement and Subsistence in Southwestern Angola
   • 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
2. (countable) A group of individuals who are related by blood and/or by marriage.
   • 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. (countable) A 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
   • 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
4. (countable) A taxonomic grouping at the family level.
   • 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...1887, Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society - Volume 9, page 353
   • The deer family grouping is Cervidae, spelled without italics and pronounced SERV-ee-dah.2013, Leonard Lee Rue, Whitetail Savvy, →ISBN
5. (countable) A group of related items.
   • 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. (uncountable) The strategy of putting related inventory items together.
   • 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
   • Is family grouping applied in storage with the objective of making processes efficient?2012 -, Riccardo Manzini, Warehousing in the Global Supply Chain, →ISBN
7. (UK, uncountable) The system of grouping children of differing ages together, used primarily at the preschool level.
   • 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...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...2012, Susanne A. Denham, Rosemary Burton, Social and Emotional Prevention and Intervention Programming for Preschoolers, →ISBN