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.     

Won't somebody please think of the children? Or,South Park fanfic and the political realm

Comedy Central’s South Park has proved a bone of contention for traditional guardians of youth culture. From the denunciations of pressure groups on one hand, to academics attempting to claim South Park for various political positions on the other, it is ironic that a show addressing the failure of official pedagogy has had so little attention paid to its young fans. Academics argue over the ‘message’ of South Park, in a socio-political sense, or denounce it for irresponsibly embracing post-political cynicism. Yet as Mendes et al. have argued, to draw a false division between youth entertainment and some pre-conceived notion of the political realm is a fallacy: young people’s engagement with and meaning-making practices derived from popular culture are political in themselves. This paper uses a politically informed conception of discourse analysis developed from Laclau and Mouffe to code the top-rated South Park fanfics from Fanfiction.net, a site whose primary demographic is teenagers, in pursuit of the messages young people perceive and make of the show. This project prefers concrete data over impressionistic views of ‘young people’, and attends to what teenage fans make of and do with the text, rather than imagining them as passive consumers absorbing inherent messages.     

Family Integration,Achievement Values,Academic Self-Concept and Dropping Out of High School

Recognizing the linkages among family, neighborhood, and work, this study examines whether neighborhood resources (neighborhood satisfaction and informal helping) mediate the relationships between job stressors (work hours, job inflexibility, and work-to-family conflict), family stressors (housework hours and family-to-work conflict), and father-child relationship quality. We performed OLS regressions on data from fathers (N?=?85) from a random sample of couples from the northern part of a western state. Results indicate a direct and negative relationship between job inflexibility and father-child relationship quality that is partially mediated by neighborhood satisfaction. Additionally, family-to-work conflict bears a direct and negative relationship with father-child relationship quality, and neighborhood satisfaction mediates this relationship. Altogether, the analyses support the contention that neighborhood resources may mitigate some of the stresses associated with work and family life.     

Future Directions: Social Development in the Context of Social Justice

Many societies and cultures have become increasingly diverse and heterogeneous over the past decade. This diversity has a direct bearing on social justice in children's and adolescents' social development. Increased diversity can have positive consequences, such as the possibility for increased empathy, tolerance, perspective taking, and the celebration of various cultural traditions and values, but it can also result in increased prejudice, bias, and discrimination. In this article, we suggest that incorporating a focus on social justice can transform the field of social development. This can be done by considering the larger societal context of diversity or heterogeneity when investigating children's peer interactions, attitudes, group identity, and social experience. In addition, new findings that incorporate social justice concerns have implications for designing interventions to enhance children's healthy social development. We highlight and discuss recent areas of research that bear on this perspective and discuss avenues for future research and investigation.