Explaining Family Change and Variation: Challenges for Family Demographers

Twenty years ago, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) issued a request for proposals that resulted in the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), a unique survey valuable to a wide range of family scholars. This paper describes the efforts of an interdisciplinary group of family demographers to build on the progress enabled by the NSFH and many other theoretical and methodological innovations. Our work, also supported by NICHD, will develop plans for research and data collection to address the central question of what causes family change and variation. We outline the group's initial assessments of orienting frameworks, key aspects of family life to study, and theoretical and methodological challenges for research on family change. Finally, we invite family scholars to follow our progress and to help develop this shared public good.     

Imagined Masculinity: Body,Sexuality, and Family among Israeli Military Reserves

This article explores how middle‐class Jewish men on reserve duty in the Israel Defense Forces form a “proper” masculinity through humor and jokes. Reserve service creates a fruitful territory for researching four issues that have not been extensively studied in the literature on masculinities: the relation between gender and age, the periodic reaffirmation of masculinity along the life course, how women are perceived as sexual objects and how informal social pressure is placed on singles to marry and begin families, and how men not only are motivated by homophobia but use images of women and homosexuals to map and interpret power relations and competition between men.     

Family Well-Being Between Work,Care and Welfare Politics

Summary

This article examines how policy-relevant aspects such as gender equality, work load and relationship qualities affect family well-being. The analysis aims at identifying the constellation of factors that can explain family life satisfaction using data drawn from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). Despite the fact that Norwegian welfare policies have a strong emphasis on supporting gender equality and mothers'employment, the study finds a gendered pattern in parents'work and family lives. Family well-being is shown to be influenced by family internal factors, such as time pressure, the quality of close relations, and level of conflict. This in turn provides input for national policy-making.     

Family Instability,Multipartner Fertility,and Behavior in Middle Childhood

Two concepts capture the dynamic and complex nature of contemporary family structure: family instability and multipartner fertility. Although these circumstances are likely to co‐occur, their respective literatures have proceeded largely independently. The authors used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 3,062) to consider these dimensions of dynamic family structure together, asking whether they independently predict children's behavior problems at age 9. Frequent family instability was consistently predictive of higher predicted levels of behavior problems for children born to mothers who were unmarried, an association largely attenuated by factors related to family stress. Multipartner fertility was robustly related to self‐reported delinquency and teacher‐reported behavior problems among children born to mothers who were married.     

Care Diamonds and Welfare Regimes in East and South-East Asian Societies: Bridging Family and Welfare Sociology

This paper tries to bridge the micro-level analyses of social networks for "care" provision which have been conducted in the field of family sociology, and the macro-level framework on welfare mix which has been developed in the area of welfare sociology, because the options for creating social networks are given to individuals by society. A group of Asian researchers including the author have conducted comparative research on social networks for childcare and elderly care in six Asian societies, namely Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, and Japan. To reexamine the results, the author draws diagrams of the care diamonds in each society for each type of care (childcare or elderly care) to show the balance between four sectors (the state, market, family and relatives, and the community) which determines the pattern of welfare mix. The most prevalent pattern in Asian societies today is the pattern with a large family and relatives sector and a large market sector. We can interpret it as a familistic welfare regime combined with liberalism. However, Japan alone shows a pattern close to pure familism because the development of the market sector is restricted by immigration policies prohibiting the employment of foreign domestic workers. Unlike other Asian societies which were exposed to the global market before the family could become a closed organization and marketization of care work took place easily, in Japan, where the modern family system had been established, both socialization and marketization of care work have stagnated.     

Social Changes and Welfare Reform in South Korea: In the Context of the Late-coming Welfare State

The Korean welfare state is facing diverse pressures and challenges due to changing economic, social, and demographic circumstances: prevalence of the service economy, labor market flexibility, weakened family function and increase of untraditional families, lowest fertility rate and the most rapid ageing of the population among OECD countries, and so forth. These challenges, which indicate new types of social risks, have been stimulating a series of discussions on welfare reform in Korea. The old social risks such as retirement, ill health, poverty, and unemployment have not disappeared because of insecure or inadequate welfare, and now these risks are even intertwined with the so-called new social risks. Thereby the Korean welfare state is facing complicated reform tasks. This study attempts to analyze the structure and context of these challenges in Korea, and to explore the various driving forces that have formulated Korean welfare reform in recent decades. Through the above analyses, this study will shed light the characteristics of welfare reform in Korea as a late-coming welfare state.     

Social Adaptation and Welfare Planning in the Post-Nomadic Urban Environment: The Case of the Israeli Negev Bedouin

Abstract

State planning to settle and to provide services for nomadic populations is a complex enterprise. In Israel, the government's efforts to plan, direct, and contain the Negev Bedouins' social development upon settlement has fostered both positive and negative changes in the new communal setting. Women, children, and the elderly have proven to be particularly at risk during the settlement transition period. Proactive efforts on the part of indigenous and Jewish community planners and social workers provide a crucial component encouraging communal adaptation to new environments and lifestyles. Experiences in the Negev may also provide lessons for community practitioners in other previously mobile communities.     

Associations of Childhood Religious Attendance,Family Structure,and Nonmarital Fertility Across Cohorts

This article considers associations among childhood family structure, childhood religious service attendance, and the probability of having a nonmarital first birth before age 30 for non‐Hispanic White women born 1944 to 1964 using data from the 1988 and 1995 waves of the National Survey of Family Growth (N = 5,995). We found that attending religious services weekly during childhood and growing up in a 2‐biological‐parent family were associated with lower odds of having had a nonmarital first birth. These associations were quite stable across cohorts, although religious attendance was less associated with nonmarital fertility for the youngest cohort. We estimate that changes in these childhood experiences account for 22% of the increase in nonmarital first births across these cohorts.     

Family Cap and Nonmarital Fertility: The Racial Conditioning of Policy Effects

Using an experimental design, this research examines the effect of the nation's first family cap on the births, abortions, and contraception use of over 8,000 women receiving public assistance in New Jersey. The family cap denies additional cash benefits to children conceived while the mother is receiving public assistance. Our research shows that a targeted welfare benefit manipulation does influence fertility behavior; however, the effect is conditioned by race. We find that Black women in the experimental group have a 21% lower birth rate and a 32% higher abortion rate than Black women in the control group. We do not find a birth effect for Hispanic or White women. We discuss the policy implications of the effects of a segmented family cap.     

Family Changes in the Context of Lowest-Low Fertility: The Case of Japan

Abstract: Japan has currently one of the lowest-low fertility rates in the world. Low fertility in Japan is due to the extreme postponement of marriage and childbearing, and their weak recuperation in women in their 30s, as well as very low levels of cohabitation and extra-marital fertility. Both changing and unchanged aspects of families are related to lowest-low fertility in Japan. Although premarital sexual activities have increased, women's contraceptive initiative is very weak: they may be connected with weak partnership formation. "Parasite singles", "freeters", or "NEETs", probably related to weak family formation, have increased, but they may be connected with strong filial bondage derived from the traditional family system, i.e. Women have been normatively, educationally, and occupationally emancipated, but gender norms are currently divided in half among Japanese people, which may deter the revising of working conditions for women with children, leading to delaying family formation among working women. Lowest-low fertility conversely brings about family changes. Its direct effect is the increase of lifetime celibacy and childless couples, which may jeopardize the universality of families. Its indirect effect is through policy response to low fertility as well as labor shortages and population aging: recently, both family and labor policies have been strengthened to make it easier for working women to continue their jobs after marriage and childbirth, which might in turn promote family formation in Japan.     

Indian Family Exception Doctrine: still losing children despite the Indian Child Welfare Act

Since 1982, the Indian Family Exception Doctrine has been circumventing the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. Although not clearly defined, the doctrine has been pivotal in several American Indian child welfare cases in the United States. Over time, the doctrine continues to evolve and self-define. Several phrases have become part of the definition, such as Indian family and culture. This doctrine presents major concerns and implications in the field of child welfare.     

Meeting Family Housing Needs: Experiences of Rural Women in the Midst of Welfare Reform

Though sometimes overlooked, the availability, affordability, and quality of housing in rural communities are a potential barrier to transitioning from welfare to work. In this investigation we examine housing issues confronting 17 rural women and their families who were recipients of welfare benefits in 1997. Respondents' housing accounts illustrate the significance of reliance on both government housing subsidies and informal subsidies supplied by friends, family, and more distant relatives. The study focuses on concerns women have in meeting their families shelter needs and the complexities involved in doing so. The findings of the research suggest that additional housing policy initiatives, as well as a targeted research agenda are needed, especially for families whose welfare benefits are nearing termination.     

For-Profit Welfare: Contracts, Conflicts, and the Performance Paradox

This article examines how financial inducements in performancecontracts shape the inner workings of a for-profit welfare-to-worktraining program serving long-term recipients. Our work paysparticular attention to how contract requirements shape relationshipsbetween manager and line staff and their treatment of clients.We argue that contract design, coupled with bottom-level managementefforts to meet contractual obligations, leads to a performanceparadox—the same actions taken to achieve contractualresults ironically produce negative program practice and poorclient outcomes. Thus, rigidly constructed legal agreementsbetween the government and private service providers can distortincentive structures, causing programmatic conflicts betweenmanagement and staff, and do little to reduce long-term welfareuse and diminish recipients' poverty.