A scoping review of the roles of pets in the families

Abstract

Pets are playing an increasingly important role in the lives of families, as many international studies have shown. In Hungary, however, there is not yet much research on the role of pets in the family. The aim of this paper is to review the international literature on this issue. For this purpose, we apply the scoping review method. In this framework, we collected international journal articles published between 1980 and 2022 that focused on our chosen topic.

Based on the results of the scoping review, we found 47 articles that matched the focus of our research. After reading them through, the following topics emerged: the emergence of fictive kinship between humans and animals, the related flexible role of pets within the family and the changing role of owners. In addition, some of the journal articles analysed the different types of attachments between pets and their owners, and related to this, the issue of grief at the loss of a companion animal is often at the centre of these studies. Finally, there is also a focus on how pet owners form partnerships and whether pets can be a substitute for children.

Our review of the literature also revealed that the empirical studies we examined were based on a rather homogeneous sample, as middle-class families and, within that, studies with women were over-represented. Thus, for future studies, it would be important for researchers to apply a more heterogeneous sample than has been used so far.