CALIBRATING MEASURES OF FAMILY ACTIVITIES BETWEEN LARGE- AND SMALL-SCALE DATA SETS

Two studies of working families are combined to demonstrate a strategy for producing reliable estimates from the combination of self-reported (large N) and observational (small N) data. Both studies examine where and how dual-career families spend time at home. The 500 Family Study is sociological and uses self-reported time diary data from a national sample; the CELF study is anthropological and uses observational scan sampling data from a regional sample of 32 families. The data are combined as if they constitute one sample, and an analytic solution for establishing the reliability of the resulting composite estimates of time use is provided. Merging the data sets provides validation for each study, neither of which is without potential methodological weaknesses. The advantages of combining data from the independent data collection methods are discussed, and selected substantive findings on families' activities are highlighted, illustrating similarities and differences between findings in the independent and combined data sets. Results show that working families spend significant time in a small spectrum of home spaces, particularly kitchens and living rooms, with leisure activities prevailing, but mothers, fathers, and children differ in where and how they spend their time. Overall, a template for merging data from different disciplines and methods is provided.     

In-Home Training and the Production of Children's Human Capital

This paper adapts the idea of on-the-job training (OJT) to investments that families make in children before formal schooling begins. Like OJT, in-home training occurs in informal settings, requires costly time inputs and is complementary with formal schooling. In addition to choosing among home production, leisure, and market work, parents also choose which particular home activities to pursue. That working mothers dramatically reduce the time they devote to leisure, sleep, and other home activities in order to preserve their time in human capital-building activities with children, illustrates and validates the home production framework.     

The Effects of the Healthy Families America Home Visitation Program on Parenting Attitudes and Practices and Child Social and Emotional Competence

This study examined the effects of a Healthy Families America (HFA) credentialed home visitation program on the parenting attitudes and practices of a sample of at-risk parents. It also examined the social and emotional competence of children whose parents successfully completed the program. The HFA model is an intensive early intervention program that targets at-risk families through home visitation services. Successful completion of the program is a process that takes between 3 and 5 years. Results indicate that, relative to the baseline, parents who completed the program showed significant positive change in parenting attitudes and practices. In addition, relative to other children their age, the children of families who successfully completed the program exhibited significantly higher levels of performance on measures of social and emotional competence.     

The social stratification of time use patterns

Time use is both a cause of social inequality and a consequence of social inequality. However, how social class stratifies time use patterns is seldom studied. In this paper, I describe the time use patterns in the years 1983 and 2015 by social class, and gender in the British context. Using sequence analysis methods, I show how the diversity of time use patterns in British society is socially stratified. I find that 13 clusters capture the heterogeneity of time use patterns and that these clusters are associated with social class, gender, and day of the week. These clusters capture patterns of paid and unpaid work schedules, as well as leisure patterns. The results show that men have experienced a reduction of the standard Monday to Friday 8-hr working day, while women have experienced a general increase in this type of schedule. On the other hand, patterns of domestic working days have reduced for women and increased for men. Important differences exist in paid and unpaid work patterns between social classes. Working-class women have experienced an important increase in shift work on weekends. They are also much more likely to be doing unpaid work on weekdays compared to upper-class and middle-class women. Working-class men are more likely to experience non-working days and leisure days on both weekdays and weekends and are more likely to be doing shift work. They are also more often doing unpaid work on weekdays compared to men in upper-class households. Patterns of childcare indicate that all families have increased their childcare time. Men in upper-class households in particular have experienced an important growth in childcare time between 1983 and 2015. I conclude by discussing how time use can further our understanding of social stratification.     

Why more ‘quality time’ is not on the top of children's lists: the ‘qualities of time’ for children1

For many years the everyday reality of working parents and their children has been captured in notions of ‘quality time’ versus ‘quantity time’. On the one hand it is suggested that what families need is ‘more time’ for parents to spend together with their children and less time working. On the other hand this has been countered with arguments saying that attention has to be paid to how parents spend their time together with their children. As a result quality time is often presented through idealised images of ‘happy families’. Quality time is seen as parents engaging with their children in particular activities or outdoor excursions that create and maintain family enjoyment, care and togetherness. However, such debates are based on assumptions of what would be ‘good’ for today's children and neglect the perspective of children themselves. This paper draws on field research carried out with 10–11‐year‐old children on their understandings and use of time in an urban and a rural setting in the north of England. The paper points to five ‘qualities of time’ identified by children. These qualities suggest that children's views of time spent with their families cannot be seen as separate from the time they spend with friends, at school and on their own. The paper argues that the quality/quantity time conundrum needs replacing by fuller and more representative accounts of the varied aspects of time that matter for children. These need to be situated in the processes through which family, school and work life take place on a daily basis and in relation to children's life course. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reconsidering Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working Class(es)

This paper focuses on the early goals, past educational experiences, familial support, and current career goals of a sample of 80 White middle-class and working-class parents in a medium-sized northeastern city in the United States. The research will help determine whether members of the working class have lived in or still live in worlds of pain. Middle-class parents overwhelmingly report having had high goals and aspirations in high school, positive experiences in school, and supportive parents and role models in their families. Moreover, they report being satisfied in their current occupational positions. The working-class parents present a more complex pattern: For each of the areas studied—early goals, schooling, familial support, and job satisfaction and future goals—some of the working-class respondents report better experiences than the others. A more inclusive sampling strategy proved useful in this study in documenting the varied life experiences and attitudes found among members of the working class. These findings provide support for and modification of Rubin's (1976, 1994) portraits of the working class.     

Gay and Lesbian Couples at Home: Identity Work in Domestic Space

ABSTRACT

Social research into gay/lesbian experiences of home has tended to posit domestic environments as alienating for gay/lesbian subjects, silencing their sexual identities. Meanwhile, work on the spatiality of sexual identity more broadly has largely focused on individuals or communities, not couples or households. In this context, this article aims to recover the importance of home for gay/lesbian couples. I explore how cohabiting gay/lesbian couples generate shared identities through domestic space, examining various ways in which these couples use homes to establish and consolidate their partnerships. Empirical data is drawn from twenty-three in-depth interviews with gay/lesbian Australians who are cohabiting, or have cohabited, with a long-term partner. The sample is largely limited to white, educated, middle-class gay men and lesbians living in urban Australia, providing an ethnographic window into the domestic identity-formation of a particular community of practice. Four key themes regarding “coupled identities” at home emerged from the interviews: (i) the importance of privacy and control at home for enabling gay/lesbian partnerships; (ii) the negotiated creation and use of shared domestic spaces; (iii) the accumulation and arrangement of household objects in those domestic spaces; and (iv) the importance of maintaining separate “personal” spaces for each partner for the well-being of the relationship.     

Permanency through Group Work: A Pilot Intensive Reunification Program

Reunification of foster children with their birth parents is a critical focus of child welfare services, and the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 has intensified the effort to reunify families. A large child welfare agency in a mid-western state developed an evidence-based treatment reunification model, that is based on the practices and principles that have been found to most predictive of a safe, timely and successful return home. This model is intensive, home-based, and incorporates an innovative support group for birth parents. A comparative evaluation of this model after 1 year finds that its reunification rates are double that of comparable cases receiving the agency’s conventional reunification services.     

Growing Home

ABSTRACT

Using the concepts of “throwntogetherness” and disorder this article offers another perspective on the role of domestic disorder in making a family home. with original data generated within a qualitative research project with same-sex parented families in Sydney, Australia, the article considers some of the everyday ways parents “use disorder” to regulate and reconcile expectations of family life with lived reality, as materialized through reconfiguring existing home spaces. At the same time, the discussion fills in some empirical gaps in contemporary geographies of family by presenting some family home cultures that remain underrepresented in the empirical work on home and family: the domestic, everyday routines, and rhythms of same-sex parented families.     

Parenting,Uncertainty, and Expert Advice: How Privileged American Families Work with Private Counselors in Their Children's College Race

This article uses privileged families who hire Independent Educational Consultants (IECs) as an instance to examine how privileged parents collaborate with individuals whom they consider educational experts to support their children in the college race. We argue that advantaged parents' anxieties about their children have created a market for IECs who provide expert advice in order to mitigate the uncertainties that these parents experience and to manage various goals that they want to achieve at an important turning point in their children's lives. Drawing primarily on interviews with parents who work with IECs, we introduce the concept of “collaborative cultivation” to analyze the processes whereby advantaged parents rely on the expertise and expert status of private counselors to cope with their and their children's vulnerability in the college race while at the same time preparing their children for the unknown future. The parental method of “concerted cultivation” reveals how elite parents rely on individuals they perceive as experts to establish “bridges” between their own social worlds and the academic worlds that appear to beyond their control. This bridging labor points to the myriad cultural beliefs enacted to justify the child‐rearing goals that privileged parents wish to accomplish by working with IECs.     

Mental health issues and the foster care system: an examination of the impact of the Adoption and Safe Families Act

Although marriage and family therapists are being called on to help at-risk families, some say that clinicians have insufficient knowledge about the impact of policies on families involved in the foster care system. The purpose of this qualitative investigation was to identify how the Adoption and Safe Families Act informs decision making, to recognize trends in decisions regarding termination of parental rights of parents with mental health issues, and to explore treatment issues of families involved in the foster care system. Results indicate that court cases decided after the implementation of the Adoption and Safe Families Act are likely to result in termination of parental rights. Implications for clinicians and researchers are discussed.     

Cosmopolitan pathways from the Global South: How non-middle-class students become desirable Fulbright applicants

International student mobility (ISM) is largely interpreted as a global middle-class capital accumulation strategy. Cosmopolitanism, which is the named outcome and effect of these mobile forms of social and cultural capital, is therefore disproportionately available to already privileged students. This study moves beyond this prevailing interpretation by examining how students from working- or lower-middle-class families with limited resources in Global South countries combine bottom-up cosmopolitanism with educational mobility to get selected into highly competitive spaces, such as the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, the most prestigious educational and cultural program in the United States. Based on 20 in-depth interviews with successful Fulbright applicants and participant observation, my findings suggest that working- and lower-middle-class applicants are largely successful because of their cosmopolitan dispositions which they cultivate in creative and agentive ways. This article adds texture and complexity to existing discussions on middle-class hegemony in ISM and cosmopolitan subject-making.     

What happens during and after school: Conditions faced by working parents living in poverty and their school-aged children

Past research has not looked directly at how parental working conditions are affecting the lives of school-age children living in or near poverty. This study examines the effects that the working conditions faced by low-income parents have on the care their school-age children receive and on parental involvement in their children's education and development. In-depth, semistructured interviews were conducted with 74 families with school-age children, including 44 families living at or below 150% of the federal poverty level and 30 families living above 150% of poverty. Teachers at every public afterschool program in the city were interviewed. One out of two low-income working parents faced barriers to becoming involved in their children's education. Two out of five faced barriers to participating in school meetings, school trips, or school events. Many parents had difficulty finding any time to spend with their children, let alone time to assist them with their schoolwork. The difficulties they faced are described in detail. Implications for educational and labor policy are discussed.     

Relatives as Child Care Givers: After Hours Support for Nontraditional Workers

This study uses a sample of 1,841 families from the National Child Care Survey (1990) and accompanying Low-Income Supplement (1990) to determine the amount and timing of child care services offered by relatives to working families with young children. Results indicate that relative care is primarily provided by grandparents. Compared to other parents, single parents and those working nontraditional hours are significantly more likely to use relatives for child care, and their children spend significantly longer periods of time in relative care, especially at nontraditional times of the day. The study conclusion is that relatives are facilitating parental employment by providing child care at times of the day when other market alternatives usually are not available.     

A Vocabulary of Motives: Understanding How Parents Define Quality Time

Although discussions of parenting refer to quality time, parents’ views of quality time have not been explored. Using the Sloan 500 Family Study, this article examines how 220 parents from 110 dual‐parent families define the spending quality time with their families and finds 3 distinct views: Structured‐planning parents saw it as planned family activities, child‐centered parents emphasized heart‐to‐heart talks with their children, and time‐intensive parents believed that all the time they spent with their families was quality time. Mothers and fathers both valued quality time, but, particularly when parents within a household disagreed, mothers more often described having a more active parenting role and assumed greater responsibility for quality time, reflecting a gendered division of parenting within the home.     

Grandmothers' Involvement Among Young Adolescents Growing Up in Poverty

Grandmothers often play an important role in low‐income minority families through providing support to their adult children as well as care to their grandchildren. However, little is known about how varying types of grandmother involvement may influence their grandchildren's functioning. This paper uses data from Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three‐City Study, a longitudinal study sampling low‐income minority youth from high‐poverty neighborhoods, to explore how young adolescents (age 10–14 years at Time 1) function over time based on grandmothers' residential status and their level of caretaking responsibility. Analyses find that young adolescents with a custodial grandmother displayed greater levels of externalizing problem behaviors over time while young adolescents with a co‐residing grandmother reported fewer depressive symptoms over time as compared with their peers. The importance of considering the influence of grandmothers who are more involved, especially among low‐income, minority families, in research and practice will be discussed.     

Spousal influences on parents’ non-market time choices

This paper considers the effect of spouse’s characteristics on time devoted to leisure, child caregiving, and home production of married mothers and fathers using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). Five spousal variables are considered: the relative wage of the wife compared to her husband, spouse’s weekly hours of employment, and the spouse’s time in three unpaid activities. Each requires instrumentation in order to address issues of endogeneity and possible selection bias. In addition, in order to handle the problem that there is only a single time diary per household, two alternative strategies are explored: out-of-sample prediction and propensity matching. Using either method, the results show little effect of one spouse on the unpaid time use of parents. Most importantly, relative wage does not appear to affect time use choices of parents. There does appear to be a small consistent effect of one’s spouse’s leisure time on own leisure time; husband’s and wife’s leisure time appears to be complementary.     

Birthday celebrations as a family homelessness intervention: a mixed-methods analysis

Families report that the experience of homelessness presents a significant barrier to family functioning and interrupts regular family routines. This study uses data from 22 homeless shelters in Massachusetts to examine the relationship between birthday parties for homeless children, family functioning, and parent well-being in homeless families. The study includes a sample of 255 residents across 20 homeless shelters in both urban and rural communities that received regular monthly birthday parties from a nonprofit agency. A small comparison sample of 25 residents came from two shelters that were not receiving birthday parties from the nonprofit agency. Data from 78 staff members working at all 22 shelters was collected on shelter environment and resident cohesion. Results indicated that residents in those shelters that received monthly birthday party celebrations for children had higher levels of happiness. Residents’ satisfaction with the birthday parties showed correlations between levels of hope, happiness, and parental empowerment. Shelter staff who reported higher levels of satisfaction with birthday parties also reported higher levels of resident cohesion. Results point toward the value of continuing regular family routines, such as annual birthday celebrations, to help mitigate the stressors and disruptions of homelessness on families.     

High hopes: unwed parents' expectations about marriage

PRWORA attempts to limit welfare use and encourage self-sufficiency in families headed by unmarried parents by promoting the goal of marriage. This paper addresses some important issues that underlie policy discussions of encouraging marriage and strengthening fragile families. In particular, the paper analyzes data from the first seven cites of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey to investigate how economic factors, cultural and gender beliefs, and relationship characteristics shape unmarried mothers' and fathers' expectations about marrying their child's other parent. The results show that unmarried parents, and cohabiting parents in particular, have high hopes about marriage at the time of their child's birth. The analysis also finds that reporting drug or alcohol problems, frequent conflict, physical violence, and gender distrust are associated with lower marriage expectations, while perceiving benefits to marriage and living with the other parent are associated with higher expectations. Mothers with employed partners also hold higher expectations for marriage before controlling for cohabitation. For parents who desire marriage, it might be possible to support them in this transition, particularly through policies that help families overcome economic and structural barriers to their stability. At the same time, it is important to recognize the reasons unmarried parents have low expectations about marriage, such as drug or alcohol problems, conflict, distrust, and perceiving little benefit to marriage. Encourage marriage for parents in these circumstances might not only be inappropriate but deterimental to families.     

Positive youth development within a family leisure context: youth perspectives of family outcomes

Although a variety of recreation programs provide valuable settings for youth development and should continue, the home should be considered the first and perhaps the most essential context for positive youth development. Family leisure experiences are purposively or intentionally planned by invested adults (parents) to create and maintain meaningful relationships and provide supportive opportunities for their children to learn skills and develop behaviors that will not only strengthen current family life but ultimately contribute to their overall positive development. The article presents family leisure research from a youth perspective and sets out the implications of the role of home-based core types of leisure that families engage in.