family

USA Today ran a story yesterday about how we are starting to see a shift in conflict in the work-life balance associated with gender roles.

Sharon Jayson of USA Today reports on new data from a telephone interview survey by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute, suggesting that we have reached a ‘tipping point’ in attitudes toward gender roles and the balance of work responsibilities and family life.

Women in two-earner couples are contributing more to family income, but it’s the men who are feeling more conflicted over the work-life balance, according to a survey of 3,500 workers released today.

Asked how much jobs and family life interfere with each other, 59% of fathers in dual-income families reported conflict in 2008, while just 35% did in 1977. For mothers, reported conflict increased from 40% to 45%.

The sociological interpretation…

“It does signal more equality of expectations — that men are no longer let off the hook,” says Scott Coltrane, a sociologist at the University of Oregon. Up until the past decade, “men weren’t doing enough to add stress to their lives,” he says.

Since then, men have been spending more time with their children and more time caretaking, which the survey finds has elevated the inner strife.

“What we see here is that the conflict for women hasn’t increased as fast because it was already so high,” says sociologist Kathleen Gerson of New York University. Other findings show:

•Annual income contributed by women in dual-income couples rose to 44% in 2008; 26% of such women earned at least 10% more than their partners.

•Traditional gender roles have lost favor among both sexes. About 60% of men and women say they disagree with the idea that men should earn the money and women should take care of the children.

•Women under age 29 are just as likely as men to want greater work responsibility, regardless of whether they have children.

“When you get men and women feeling the same, maybe it is a sea change,” says Ellen Galinsky, the institute’s president.

Sociologist Brian Powell of Indiana University, however, says even though “there probably has been real change, I have the sense there’s been more of a change in terms of people’s view that there should be equal division. That’s probably farther ahead of the actual behavior.”

Read more.

Fox News reported earlier this week on the new campaign funded by the federal government intended to promote marriage. Their report suggests that supporters of this program insist that they are merely providing information to those who want it, while “critics say Washington is walking a fine line between providing information and advocacy.”

What does the campaign entail, according to Fox News?

Washington plans to soon pour $5 million into a national media campaign aimed at 18-to-30 year olds, outlining the benefits of marriage and tips on having a healthy one. The campaign hinges in part on the Web site, TwoofUs.org, which cycles readers through advice on the traditional stages of a relationship: dating, engagement, marriage and eventually parenting.

Fox News talked to sociologist Paul Amato about this new initiative…

“There is a huge tax burden involved with divorce and non-marital child bearing,” said Paul Amato, sociology professor at Penn State University who is providing research for the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center’s campaign. “Every year divorce and non-marital child bearing costs us taxpayers over $100 billion a year. That’s year after year after year. That’s a lot of money.”

Amato said the campaign is not trying to govern romance.

“The government shouldn’t be in the job of telling young people what to do with their lives,” he said. “Marriage and relationships are very personal decisions. We just want to provide information for people who choose to seek it out.”

Read more.

NYU sociologist Dalton Conley was featured on ‘Marketplace’ this past Tuesday. Host Kai Ryssdal talks with Conley about the blurring line between work and family now that more Americans are taking fewer vacations and clocking in more hours at the office.

An excerpt from the interview:

RYSSDAL: This [Conley’s book, Elsewhere, USA]  is fundamentally, I guess, a book about work-life balance, but really what you do is you tell us how we’re not getting any of it right.

CONLEY: Yeah, it’s really about work-life imbalance and the underlying forces — some of them very visible but some of them more invisible — that have created this new social and economic landscape that we work in.

RYSSDAL: And the visible ones we know about, right? I mean everybody’s got their Blackberry, they’re on the computer all the time, the kids have 14 different things to do after school. What are the ones though that maybe we’re not entirely aware of?

CONLEY: Well, a couple of big socio-demographic changes have occurred since the 60s. First is rising economic inequality. Every year since 1969 economic inequality has risen in the United States and has particularly been concentrated in the top half. In fact, the higher up you go, the more inequality has risen and the gaps get bigger. And I think this causes what I call an economic redshift, no matter where you are on the top half, it looks like everybody is rushing away from you.

RYSSDAL: That’s insane. I mean, on the face of it, that’s nuts, right?

CONLEY: It’s a brave new world. For the first time, it was people with incomes over $200,000, in a New York Times poll, that said that they feel poorer when they’re around rich people as compared to people who are actually poor. That’s stunning to me. And for the first time in labor history, the further up the income ladder you go, the more hours you work.

Listen to the show.

United Press International reports this morning on new work published in Research in the Sociology of Work, from Ithaca College sociologist Stephen Sweet, about how in our current dual-income economy, the loss of one person’s job can put a family at significant financial risk. The result is significant anxiety for some families trying to make it in a floundering economy.

“Nine in 10 dual-income couples in New York state feel there is some risk that one or both of their jobs might not exist in the next couple of years,” lead author sociologist Stephen Sweet of Ithaca College said in a statement.

“In the old economy, we largely depended on the male bread winner. The wife was a homemaker and the men were much more likely to have jobs that were secure; this is especially true for white middle-class families where job security increased with seniority.”

In the old economy, if the husband lost a job the wife was reserve labor and she could go out into the labor force and make ends meet, whereas to maintain a middle-class lifestyle in today’s economy, dual-income couples are the norm to make ends meet, Sweet added.

The study, published in Research in the Sociology of Work, described how the new economy dismantled the systems that made workers more confident they would hold their jobs as they aged and their family investments increased.

“Most working middle class families have next to no savings and the savings they do have are often in things they can’t touch, like their 401(k). They are often in debt so they are living paycheck to paycheck,” Sweet said.

Read more.

USA Today ran a story yesterday about a new federally funded ad campaign about marriage. Reporter Sharon Jayson writes, “Marriage has turned into quite a quandary for many young adults. Should they or shouldn’t they? Can they escape divorce? Will moving in together forestall a breakup? These conflicted feelings haven’t gone without notice in Washington.”

The latest statistics have caused some concern among policymakers…

The average age at first marriage is now almost 26 for women and 28 for men. And a growing percentage of Americans aren’t marrying at all: Provisional federal statistics released Tuesday report 7.1 marriages per 1,000 people in 2008, down from 10 per 1,000 in 1986.

This new campaign seeks to change that… with the help of a sociologist….

Faced with such numbers, the federal government is funding a $5 million national media campaign that launches this month, extolling the virtues of marriage for those ages 18 to 30.

“We’re not telling people ‘Get married’ but ‘Don’t underestimate the benefits of marriage,’ ” says Paul Amato, a Pennsylvania State University sociologist and adviser to the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center, which is spearheading the campaign.

The resource center, a federally funded virtual clearinghouse, works under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families.

Research suggests a bevy of benefits for those who marry, including better health, greater wealth and more happiness for the couple, and improved well-being for children.

Amato’s comments:

“These are people who are in the prime marrying age. A lot of them have not had good role models about how to have a successful marriage,” says Amato, co-author of the 2007 book Alone Together: How Marriage in America Is Changing.

“Marriage has become more optional, and it’s a different world out there. That’s why we think it’s important to focus on this group of young people, because the rules are less clear.”

Read more.

ScienceDaily.com ran a press release yesterday on new research in the journal Sociology of Health and Illness which looks at reproductive responses of parents of children with genetic conditions or impairments. The study suggests that these parents “may avoid the need to choose whether to undergo pre-natal testing or to abort future pregnancies by simply avoiding subsequent pregnancy altogether.”

Parents are ‘choosing not to choose’, researcher Dr Susan Kelly, who is based at the Egenis research centre at the University of Exeter, suggests, in a ‘reflection of deep-seated ambivalence’ about the options and the limitations of new reproductive technologies.

According to ‘Choosing not to choose: reproductive responses of parents of children with genetic conditions or impairments’ published in the journal Sociology of Health and Illness, more than two-thirds of parents in the USA-based study chose not to have any more children rather than accepting tests to identify or avoid the birth of an affected child. Of the parents who did have further children, a majority chose not to make use of prenatal screening or testing.

The researchers note:

“The choices associated with prenatal screening and genetic testing practices … were for most parents shaped by a heightened sense of the risks inherent in reproduction and of the limits of medicine’s ability to predict and control them,” says Dr Kelly.

“Faced with this set of choices, many parents chose to avoid future reproduction. Many parents did not perceive the information they understood to be available from prenatal testing to be useful or relevant to their sense of responsibility and control. Experiencing the birth of an affected child for some parents exposed the limitations of medical knowledge and practice, and placed medicine alongside other forms of interpretation and evidence. Interventions such as genetic testing for many were associated with uncertainty and a loss of control for parents as responsible caretakers and decision makers.”

Read more.

Live Science reports on work by sociologist Sampson Blair suggesting that the recession may fuel more family murders and suicides. They write:

The dramatic murder-suicides last month involving a family in Ohio and another in California might be the tip of a deadly domestic-violence iceberg, a sociologist says. The topic, of course, is highly complex. In a nutshell, however, several studies have found that suicides as well as domestic violence spike for the unemployed. While family murder-suicides are relatively uncommon, such events can be tied to poor economic situations such as the current recession, said Sampson Blair, a sociologist at University of Buffalo.

“I expect an increase in such incidents over the next few years because economic strain on families provokes depression and desperation,” Blair said. Blair is not alone in anticipating a rise in suicide and deadly domestic violence.

But there does appear to be some disagreement between sociologists about the link between economic trouble and suicide…

While several studies have linked unemployment to suicides, it’s not clear that overall terrible economic times cause spikes in the suicide rate.

In fact one researcher, Loren Coleman, an expert on suicides and author of “The Copycat Effect” (Pocket, 2004), argues that suicides actually decrease during times of social and economic stress: “Historical studies conducted by sociologist Steven Stack and others have discovered a noticeable dip in suicides and related violent events when there is society-wide anguish, for example, in times of massive immediate grieving in periods of wars and economic depressions.”

Suicide is more common than most people think, though. Each day about 85 U.S. residents die by suicide, or roughly 30,000 a year. Hundreds of thousands more try it every year, according to researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia. Suicide is the ninth leading cause of death in the United States, higher on the list than homicide. Men are more prone to suicide than women. (Women are three times more likely to report attempting suicide than men, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Men apparently succeed more often, as they are four times more likely to actually die from suicide.)

The reasons are myriad and certainly go beyond mere economic misfortune.

A recent study led by Temple University sociology professor Matt Wray found Las Vegas residents are much more likely to commit suicide than people living elsewhere in the country. Among the reasons speculated by Wray and his colleagues in the November online version of the journal Social Science and Medicine: gambler’s despair, of course. But short-term economic woe is probably not the only mechanism at work in Sin City.

“Las Vegas is also one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the U.S., a pattern of growth that may amplify social isolation, fragmentation and low social cohesion, all of which have long been identified as correlates of suicide,” Wray said.

Read on…

The Boston Globe reports on a series of new studies which draw upon mapping social networks and behavioral economics to help us better understand those new year’s resolutions to lose weight. These studies suggest that a spouse’s weight loss success can rub off on the other.

The study from the University of Connecticut says that couples not only tend to gain weight together, they can also lose it as a pair, even if only one of them is enrolled in a formal program. The spouses of the patients who attended regular meetings to encourage making dietary changes lost about five pounds over the course of a year, according to the results of the large clinical trial that examined weight loss strategies for people with type 2 diabetes.

“It was impressive, given they were not involved in the study program,” Amy A. Gorin, assistant professor of psychology at UConn and lead author of the article published in the International Journal of Obesity, said in an interview. “Intervening with one person in a family has a larger impact than we realized before.”

This new study draws upon the work of sociologist Nicholas Christakis…

Harvard sociologist and internist Dr. Nicholas Christakis made waves with a study last year linking obesity to social networks. Gorin, who cites his work in her paper, finds the power of peer influence encouraging when it’s flipped to the positive side.

Among the 357 couples she tracked, many of their food choices in the home became healthier – fewer potato chips and more fruits and vegetables, for example. Physical activity picked up, too.

“For some people, it was motivating to see someone start to exercise and eat healthier food,” she said, citing anecdotal evidence.

“I think my message would be, don’t underestimate the power of the environment on you,” she said. “If you start your New Year’s resolution with ‘I’m going to have enough willpower this time,’ I think you set yourself up for failure if you don’t have the support of the environment around you.”

Read more.

Yesterday the Kansas City Star ran a fascinating story about parental fear about children ‘sexting’ each other beyond the watchful eyes of their mothers and father.

But what is ‘sexting,’ you ask?

One in five kids have used their cell phone to send sexy or nude photos of themselves, according to an online poll by Teenage Research Unlimited (TRU), a trend analyst firm in Chicago. The poll surveyed 1,200 kids online. The kids had signed up as volunteers to take TRU surveys. The study was sponsored by CosmoGirl! magazine and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

The results became national news and adults dubbed it “sexting.” Newspaper and television headlines asked worried parents, “Is your teen sexting?” No one asked: “Is this a real trend or adults just totally freaked out?”

Don’t worry, a sociologist clears all of this up…

Adults may just be nervous, according to the results of an academic study. The Digital Youth Report was the result of a three-year project in which 28 researchers studied new media and teens. The researchers interviewed 800 kids and young adults in person. They also observed more than 5,000 hours of online activity.

Sociologist CJ Pascoe and her research assistant interviewed 80 kids for the project and said sexting was not a major issue. “No one brought it up,” said Pascoe, an assistant sociology professor at Colorado College. “I had them go through their last 10 messages, their last 10 photos and I never saw it.”

Sexting was not a common enough practice to make it into the report. Instead, Pascoe suggested that adults have fears about teens and the Internet. “I think what makes adults nervous about new media is they have a window into a teenager’s world for the first time, ” Pascoe said. “Teen culture has been around since the 1950s and teens have been pushing the boundaries since the 1950s but adults haven’t seen it.”

Read on…

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports this morning on recent speculation that financial woes from the deepening recession may mean that families will be having fewer children. The AJC reports on how parents are increasingly filled with doubts about their ability to provide for additional children as job prospects shrink, retirement savings plummet, and home values continue to fall.

Many economists fear that the recession will become one of the worst since the Great Depression. When that hit in the 1930s, the birthrate dropped precipitously, and the effects of having fewer people in the work force rippled through the economy two decades later. “If you can’t pay your mortgage, the last thing on your mind is to have another child,” said Dr. Khalil Tabsh, chief of obstetrics at the University of California, Los Angeles, who expects to start seeing a drop in pregnancies.

Bring in the sociologists…

Starting or growing a family often becomes more of a financial decision than an emotional one as parents calculate the sometimes overwhelming costs of health care, child care, education and other necessities, said Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at New York University.

Though birthrates usually decline in a recession, there is a countervailing theory popular with some economists: Births may swell. Some women who lose their jobs may decide it’s an opportune time to raise a child, said Gary Becker, a University of Chicago economist and sociologist.

Read more.