Overview
of center research
Introduction
In the 1950s, the typical American family was a "nuclear" family: mom was a homemaker, dad worked, and the children went to school. Mom saw to the meals, dad fixed the car, mom did the laundry, dad cleaned the gutters. These roles and their boundaries were tightly woven into America's social fabric. Now, more than 40 years later, the weave has loosened and the threads have tangled: in most households both parents work outside the home; homemaking chores that were once solely the woman's responsibility are now shared by both partners and the children.
We need to better understand the social fabric of today's families. How do dual career families balance work and family responsibilities? How are children spending their supervised and unsupervised time? How are values transmitted to children? What roles do schools and the media play in the social and moral development of children?
Today's families must be flexible and able to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances, but these changing circumstances make them more vulnerable to pressures both from within and without. The issues facing parents, children, families, employers, and schools are intricate and complex, and they are at the heart of the Alfred P. Sloan Family Center on Parents, Children & Work at The University of Chicago, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), and Michigan State University.
As part of a network of six Sloan Working Family Centers, the Sloan Center based out of the University of Chicago and currently working out of Michigan State University was founded to examine the issues facing working parents and their children by taking a different approach to conceptually defining the research issues and exploring new research methodologies. Studying these issues requires that we understand the dynamics of working families not only from the perspective of adults in the household, but also through the voices of the children. The complex dynamics of this century's working family cannot be understood through just one approach, they require interdisciplinary approaches such as those employed by The University of Chicago, NORC, and Michigan State University. Faculty from psychology, sociology, economics, child development, human development, and public policy are collaborating on this work. The Center is directed by Barbara Schneider and Linda Waite, whose research expertise explores family, marriage, adolescents, and education issues.
Center Goals
Supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, with additional funding from The University of Chicago and NORC, the Center seeks to examine how working families make investments in time and resources, how these choices are made, the effects these investments have on the quality of relationships in the household, and the resulting socialization of school-age children and adolescents. The Center's work focuses on analyzing existing databases as well as conducting original data collections. The Center has conducted intensive interviews with five hundred working families to investigate more fully the social and economic contexts that impact family investments and the quality of relationships in both the household and the workplace.
The Center supports its research efforts at all levels -- from senior faculty to postdoctorates, graduate and undergraduate students -- through research grants, opportunities for participation in local seminars and workshops, and attendance at national professional meetings. Faculty, fellows, and students participate in weekly meetings where they can discuss research activities and present findings on work in progress.
In addition, students and postdoctorate fellows are assigned a faculty mentor based on their skills, experience, and interests. They work closely with faculty members and participate in all phases of the research from the study design through analysis and preparation of papers for presentation and publication. All Center-supported students and fellows participate in the University-supported Workshop on Working Families, which gives them access to visiting speakers and the most recent research of Center members and other researchers.
Prospective students and fellows may apply by contacting the Center to request an application.
The Five Hundred Family Study
The center most recently completed an original data collection involving 500 families: 300 families with teenage children and 200 families with kindergarten-age children. In order to accomplish this massive data collection task, we trained and employed the interviewing skills of close to 40 graduate students, advanced undergraduates, post-doctoral fellows and faculty members.
Families with teenage children were drawn from 7 cities across the United States. Families with kindergarten-age children were drawn from 3 local sites. With one exception, the study sites were also used in the Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development, a longitudinal study of adolescents conducted from 1992-1997. The sites were selected to allow follow up with a small number of families from the Alfred P. Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development.
Sixty-three families from the Study of Youth and Social Development consented to participate in the working family study. The remaining families were recruited through the schools and solicitations by phone, mail, and newspaper advertisements.
Data collection included surveys, qualitative interviews, standardized child assessments, and the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). The ESM is a signal-contingent data collection method in which participants wear specially programmed wristwatches that signal them to answer brief questionnaires at randomly chosen moments throughout the day for a 7-day period. To validate the data collected by the ESM, two experiments, based on standard time diary methods were conducted during the course of the study. The results of these experiments are being used to compare the findings of ESM with other forms of time diary data collections.
Supplementary Data Collection
To supplement the data collected from families with teenage children, an abridged version of the adolescent survey was administered to a cohort of 527 ninth graders from one of our sites. The parents of all students who completed the survey in school were sent an abridged version of our parent survey to complete and return by mail.
Study of Youth and Social Development
The Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development (SSYSD) was a longitudinal study of adolescents conducted between 1992 and 1997. Participants in the study were initially chosen from 33 public schools (20 middle schools and 13 high schools) in twelve different locations across the United States. Students were selected from grades six, eight, ten, and twelve so that gender, race, ethnicity, and academic performance were representative of the entire school. A group of focal students (N = 1,214) were followed longitudinally for each of the five waves of the study, while a larger cohort sample (N = 3,602) was not followed after graduation from high school. Data collection consisted of three methods: the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), interviews, and a number of surveys, including the Teenage Life Questionnaire, an altered version of the measures used in the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988-1994 (NELS: 1988-94). Work based on the SSYSD include Schneider and Stevenson's The Ambitious Generation (1999) and Csikszentmihalyi and Schneider's Becoming Adult (2000).
Importance of Secondary Analyses
Several of the center's researchers have also been involved in secondary analyses of existing data sets. Secondary analysis has been an important part of the center's work because it informed many of the questions that were designed for the data collection effort. Further analyses of national surveys have been used to set the socio-demographic stage upon which our more detailed inquiry into the fabric of daily family life can be presented. Data bases analyzed thus far by center researchers include the Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development (SSYSD), the National Educational Longitudinal Study 1988-92 (NELS: 88-92), the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), the Pittsburgh Youth Study (PYS), the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the Marital Instability over the Life Course Survey , the Current Population Survey (CPS), and the 1990 Census 5% of Public Use Micro Sample (PUMS).