Family life quality: Theory and assessment in economically stressed farm families

The purposes of this paper are to (a) describe a resource exchange theory which outlines the dimensions of life quality (Foa and Foa, 1974), (b) present a multidimensional measure of personal evaluations of family life quality based on this theory, and (c) report the results of a two-stage study in which the scale was used. The scale includes items representing love, status, services, information, goods, and money resources received from the family. Respondents evaluated the degree to which the receipt of these resources satisfied personal needs for: (a) love and affection, (b) respect and esteem, (c) comfort and assistance, (d) shared meaning, (e) personal things, and (f) money for personal use. Reliability, correlation, covariance, cluster, and factor analyses on data from 592 subjects provided information for reducing the number of items. A reduced version of the scale was administered to 331 of the same subjects one year later. The two stages provided evidence of construct validity and reliability for the scale.Research was supported by the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station: Projects 52-054, 52-055, 52-058 Paper # 18,277 and the Minnesota Extension Service.     

Culture and Agricultural Land Tenure1

The traces left by land transactions in legal records, maps, and family-farm size corroborate oral accounts and observations gathered during field studies among seven Illinois farming communities dominated by German and Yankee ethnic groups. Cultural factors are demonstrated to shape intergenerational land transmission practices, leading to ethnically distinctive patterns of land tenure, visible in the size of farms, persistence in farming, fragmentation of holdings, and amount of acreage owned or rented. Three family-land issues, synthesized from the field studies, are posited as pivotal to how local land tenure systems develop: who owns “family”-owned land, whether the group or individual welfare is of highest priority, and the value placed on connections between the household and community. As families enact land transmission, those who control it aim to reproduce customary asymmetric relations of gender, generation, and status that maintain the cultural system in its special configuration.     

Understanding the Demand for Travel: It's Not Purely 'Derived'

We contest the derived demand paradigm for travel as a behavioural absolute. To the contrary, we suggest that travel has an intrinsic positive utility and is valued for its own sake, not just as a means of reaching a destination. We argue that the same positive characteristics that lead people to engage in travel as a recreational activity in itself are likely to motivate them to engage in apparently excess travel in the context of their mandatory and maintenance activities as well. This paper explores the conceptual basis of a positive utility for travel, and presents some results from an ongoing empirical study of attitudes toward travel. In modelling distance travelled (in each of 11 categories), we found that subjective variables such as Travel Liking, the adventure-seeker Personality trait, the travel stress Attitudinal factor, and the Excess Travel indicator added considerable explanatory power to the Demographic variables traditionally used in such models. It appears that, far from being completely determined by demographically based needs, the amount of travel demanded is heavily influenced by one's attitudes toward travel. This is not only true for discretionary (entertainment) purposes, as would be expected, but for more 'mandatory' purposes such as work/school-related activities as well. We are convinced that the demand for travel arises from a fundamental human need for mobility and other subjective characteristics, as well as from the external causes typically measured. To more accurately forecast travel demand and policy response, the role of those subjective characteristics needs to be understood much better than it is at present.     

Freedom of Movement Among Blue Collar Workers

Freedom of Movement (FM) is seen in this study as the discrepancy between aspiration and personal achievement. Five hundred and sixty-three blue collar workers responded to a mail questionnaire specifically designed to assess FM Sex, race, and income related monotonically to FM, with Blacks, women, and low income workers showing low FM. Age also related significantly to FM, but in a curvilinear fashion, with mid-age workers having the lowest FM. Implications of low PM (and anomie) are discussed in relation to homelessness, apathy, and other forms of social distress.