Politics, Public Policy and the Future

The readings of this week provide us with a good conclusion to the course material since they are concerned to what is next and how to deal with family changes. They deal with issues we had discussed before implicitly: the role of policy in a topic where the public is intertwined with the private, politics and law.

The concept that I liked the most from these readings was that of families as pathways exposed by Kathleen Gerson (2009) and I wish we had read this before in order to include this dynamic perspective to our previous discussions. The notion of the dynamic processes that constitute family paths contrasts with the static view of family structure and this is interesting because it complements the rich perspective of the life course events within the family with the broader context. For Gerson “[B]ulky categories as traditional, dual-earner, and single parent mask more complex and subtle variations within family types. […] Family life is a film, not a snapshot” (2009, p. 739). In this sense, more than family form, the focus is on the social contexts for children.

If we use the framework proposed by Gerson of family paths to analyze the ideals of care (traditional, postmodern, cold modern and warm modern) that Hochschild (2003) defines, one could argue that this ideals of care are dynamic as well. I wonder how we could conceive the nature of care as pathways. I guess that Gerson would argue that within a same family, it may transit from one ideal of care to the other resulting in different contexts of support. Something somehow present in all readings, but explicitly dealt in Gerson’s paper is the issue that since there are differences between the ideal worker paradigm and intensive parenting, although men and women ideally want equality, there is conflict because each has different incompatible fall-back strategies. In this way, we could think that going from one ideal of care to another is hard due to this conflict. One of the issues I would have liked to see discussed more explicitly in the work by Gerson (2009), Kiernan (2004) and in this specific chapter of Hochschild (2003) is where does paid domestic work and childcare fit exactly within family pathways, the boundaries of marriage and ideals of care.

Finally, since it is one of the topics I work on, I found interesting how the readings may relate to family and migration. First, I wonder how we can incorporate into the family paths that Gerson talks about, the relationship between career and migration. For example, it would be an interesting empirical question to study how internal mobility affects women (which is already studied in terms of women’s income since they sacrifice because husband gets a better job) in terms of social context in the family, not only economically. Also, Skinner and Kohler (2002) talk about what happens when one or both parents are absent in terms of the law. But I wonder how family law deals with absent parents after migration and what happens legally when children are left behind. In this sense, what role can family law have on immigration policy (to bring children with workers and to allow family reunification) as well as how can migrant sending countries assure rights for children left behind?

Q1. Skinner and Kohler (2002) write that it is the “right of parents to direct the care, control and upbringing of their children. […] Parents have the legitimate authority to make various decisions regarding their child’s welfare, including such concerns as residence, what school to attend, religious participation, and medical treatment decisions” (p. 297). Do you agree that parents should decide about children’s religion? What happens in parents with mixed religious backgrounds? Should law establish that it is not parent’s right but that each one can choose their religion later in life (e.g. during adolescence or after being 18)?

Q2. How do you think that the literature on family and family change has dealt with issues coming from globalization? Think for example on managing parents with two careers in a globalized world or the effect of diffusion of ideas via the media or how the internet has changed the use of free time and how children and adults play.

Q3. Gerson (2009, p. 750) writes: “the direction of social change thus depends on whether the structures of work and caretaking can change to support the revolutionary and irreversible shifts in individual aspirations and family needs”. Barabara Ehrenreich’s video ends with the phrase “we have collective power and we could use it to end a great deal of unnecessary suffering in the world”. All this implies changes in law and policy. Do you agree? How can this collective power really challenge interest groups and politics? How do we deal with gatekeepers?

Household Labor

A common issue in all the readings is the notion of traditional versus non-traditional gender roles, household division of labor and childcare. I found very interesting the case of Salvadoreans Carmen and Frank and what Hochschild writes as a possible explanation of their notion of gendered gifts: “They were recent immigrants in the diversity of San Francisco, and maybe roses and pie made them feel more American” (2003, p. 109). To what extent consumption patterns and the “American dream” shape family relationships and gender roles of immigrants? How do American media and pop culture consumed out of the United States shape family relationships and gender roles of those in the rest of the world? How are ideas of gender diffused with the globalized media and migration? Do you think that this has had a positive or negative effect in other societies?

I was glad that this set of readings included an international comparison and I really liked Jennifer Hook’s paper since I think that it is important to understand how individual and household level mechanisms are related to national level policies and employment practices. It is interesting to think not only about cross-country differences but also on period and cohort differences. I found very important the methodological implications of her study (Hook, 2006, p. 655): “a reliance on typologies may conflate disparate national characteristics and policies, lead to faulty conclusions, and obscure what aspects of context matter most, […] researchers should expand inquiry beyond couples, [… and…] researchers should not assume that the effects of basic demographic characteristics are stable across time and space because they vary as a function of contextual factors”.

Something I found interesting from the readings and responses of other classmates is the notion of courtship. Hochschild talks about the gifts associated to this initial stage of the relationship and I wonder how this initial courtship and romance period will influence later stages due to the relation between gifts, money and power imbalances. It is interesting that what is “accepted as the norm” is that it is the man who proposes to the woman and although the woman has the decision, her role is less proactive. In “traditional” positions, she is the one receiving flowers and chocolates. Could this be because “capuchin females pay closer attention than males to the value of “exchanged goods and services” (Brosnan and de Waal, 2003, p. 298). I wonder if there has been empirical research that compares gender roles and division of household labor in couples that have started with different types of courtship and where the woman has been the one that takes the initiative. Also, after watching the video posted I have to say I spent some time in YouTube watching other videos related to that one and found an interesting one on gender stereotypes in the media that you may want to check out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nIXUjzyMe0&feature=related

Q1. How do you think that the focus of only couples on the papers we read are affected by what Jennifer Hook found out and her methodological implications? Do you agree with her that “what is particularly interesting about a general change among all men is that it suggests a different view of gender relations than argued in some cross-national work focused solely on power, bargaining, or divorce threat” (Hook, 2006, p. 655)?

Q2. Hochschild discusses the idea of “lucky women and unlucky men”. What do you think about this idea of luck versus what was expected? How do you think the early stages influence later possible power imbalances and women’s position in negotiating within the couple and deciding who will the lucky one be?

Q3. To what extent differences in the papers read are due to social class, ethnicity or religion? How are gender codes related to political views, for example? Do you see misleading conclusions of the papers after reading the methodological implications of Hook’s work?

Work and Family

The readings of this week address different issues within what is known as work and family balance, discrimination in the labor market against women, especially motherhood, and the importation of care.

Becker and Moen (1999) focus on the different strategies that dual-earner couples engage to scale back and balance work and family: placing limits, having a one-job, one-career marriage and trading off. They interviewed middle-class people employed as salaried workers in seven different institutions in upstate New York. Their findings differ from what Arlie Hochschild finds in Amerco (2003) and discuses in chapter 15 “Emotional geography and the flight plan of capitalism”. In this chapter, she also addresses the question of family-friendly policies and environments in the workplace like flextime, flexplace, part-time jobs, job sharing, paid parental leave and others. Quebec and the rest of Canada have different family policies than the United States. How do you think the work and family balance differ in these contexts? If you are interested (and read French because I could not find the link on English), then you may read more about Quebec family policies in http://www.mfa.gouv.qc.ca/fr/Famille/Pages/index.aspx.

The notion of work and family balance is usually conceived as a woman’s problem. Regardless of assumptions of gender roles, it is true that women have different biological demands and needs when having a child, for example. Correll, Benard and Paik (2007) show that a wage penalty is actually put on motherhood. Doing a laboratory experiment and an audit study, they find that while mothers are penalized in perceived competence, salary and recommendation for hiring, men sometimes benefit from being a parent. The authors provide us with a set of explanations of how and why discrimination against mothers could be taking place. Their main possible explanations are the beliefs of tension between motherhood and the ideal worker and thus, say that the “glass ceiling” that women could face may be actually partially explained by this.

How come some women reach high positions of power? Watch some “advice” from two women that have done so: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiWGfMTIorM&feature=related. It is very likely that Inara Nooyi & Condoleezza Rice have people to help her. In order to work and keep a household, many (middle-class dual earners, not only the top elite) engage in hiring people to take care of the kids or to do domestic work. As Hochschild (2003) discusses in “Love and gold”, current arrangements of balancing work and family duties have implied an increased dependency of imported care, i.e. female immigrants that may as well leave children behind with kin or paid work to take care of them. Becker and Moen (1999) write “Their strategy of hiring a “wife” underscores the difficulty of managing two absorbing careers while simultaneously raising young children” (p. 998). Are domestic workers wifes? What are the assumptions behind the notion of what a wife should be and do?

In this same line of thought, what are the assumptions of what a woman is, for example, in the title of the book “Full-time woman, part-time career”, a new advice book like those that Hochschild analyses, by Karen Steede-Terry (to see the news of its release: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMt2Cyv3wnY; and to find information about the book: http://www.fulltimewoman.com/html/index.html). A notion that may be useful is that of ‘gatekeepers’. Becker and Moen (1999) talk about how managers, professionals and business persons control resources and perpetuate values using the media. Watch the following video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh0EQte4bFU. Is gender equality in the labor market possible if paid domestic work disappears? Are women careers that Karen Steede-Terry and Coral Arvon depict in the videos compatible to the idea of having more women in higher positions and in intensive decision-making?

I am looking forward to reading your responses and questions for discussion! See you on Monday.

Topics and Issues Within the Family: Children

One shared concept in these readings is the notion of redefinitions, specifically redefinitions of motherhood, care and intimacy. We have already discussed some of these issues before in class, but I would like to rethink how/why/when care and gender roles are redefined inside the household or family and how this affects directly and indirectly children. Another shared characteristic that I liked is the use of qualitative methods, like ethnographic research and interviews and observation.
On the same line of thought of redefinitions, I would like all to think how the papers of previous sessions would differ if they were written on a different perspective. For example, the readings of this week talk about results from psychology and from children perspective. Hochschild provides an interesting account of this change in perspective when she looks at eavesdropping children. This is one of the things I appreciated most of the paper by Orellana and colleagues. Some migration scholars have argued that the study of the phenomenon (emigration from the country of origin perspective and immigration from the country of destination perspective) is looked differently depending on where the researchers come from. How do you think the paper of Orellana and colleagues would differ if it were written by Latin Americans, Koreans or Yemeni scholars? How do you think the growing trees that children draw in school in Oakland would differ if children in Yemen drew them? What issues and subjects would have been treated in both and what differences would have there been? And this talk to another think I liked about this paper: their comparative approach.
I appreciate also the incorporation of cultural capital into the discussion of family from Stacey and Biblarz since it tells us about another comparison: class and resources. However, I wonder how cultural capital has been transformed in the last years since this paper was written. That is, I would have liked a more current paper on the discussion of social class differences and cultural capital. How do you think a comparative paper of the types of cultural capital before and after 1990 would look like? How has globalization and advances in technology affected social class differences in family-school relationships? How is the internet affecting care and gender roles? Is the internet substituting video games and television and outdoor activities?
Q1. How would you think the effect of eavesdropping differ if the conversations are about same sex couples, immigrants, poverty or poor academic achievement? That is, how does listening to the conversations of others (not only parents) in general affect children (and adults) differently and how does this affect socialization? How do conversations and comments affect self-esteem, our identity, prejudices, stereotypes and discriminating attitudes?
Q2. How has cultural capital changed recently and how do these changes affect family-school relationships? And the relationships between members of the family?
Q3. Stacey and Biblarz write about selection and homophobia and Orellana and colleagues give some hints on selection and migration. But, how do you think selection effects could bias the outcomes of eavesdropping children?

Family Structures and Bonds

The family is more than a man and a woman married with children (preferably a boy and a girl but more seem a blessing) and a dog living in a nice house with a front yard. The “ideal” nuclear family that has been portrayed in the media and that is culturally “accepted” has (fortunately, in my belief) been challenged. Family structures have been transformed in recent years and gender roles are also changing (although slower). In the readings of this session we are reminded of these transformations. As sociologists, it is important to go beyond the assumptions of the nuclear family. Vern Bengston (2001) alerts the importance of multigenerational bonds, Barbara Risman (1986) shows that fathers are competent as primary parents; Amato (2000) reviews the literature on the impacts of divorce for adults and children and shows that individuals react differently depending on protective factors, adjustment reactions and other stressors; Umberson and colleages (2005) use a life course perspective to show how marital quality is dynamic; and Fustenberg and colleages (2004) write about the changing definitions of the transition to adulthood. Do you think that at some point the news of a stay home dad (like the one we saw in the video) will end to be a news of a “rare” event?

One of the issues that I have stressed in the discussions of previous sessions is the relationship between selection and causation. Amato (2000) and Umberson and colleagues (2005) do a good job (from my point of view) delineating the blurry boundaries between these concepts and explaining when one seems to weigh more than the other. The readings also point out to the need of appropriate data to study family dynamics and in this sense, we need not only longitudinal data, but data designed to capture the complex and changing family patterns. As researchers, how do wwe deal with data gathering and use of limited data available? How can we contribute to those in charge of gathering the data to have better empirical research?

QUESTIONS:
1. From Amato’s findings and perspective of the divorce process, how do you think that policy could be designed to make this process less stressful? For example, do you think that it should be considered a public health problem and policies including broader access to therapists and mental health providers should be considered? Would social programs providing cash or other economic resources be useful? If fathers can “mother”, how should custodial decisions be taken? Would you think adoption regulations should be reviewed to include single fathers?
2. If transition to adulthood seems to be segmented by class, then what are the implications and consequences of this? What is the relationship between poverty, intergenerational mobility, family structures and different trajectories of transition to adulthood? Fustenberg and colleagues mention the role of the economy and education in delaying marriage and parenthood. How do you think the findings of the readings differ by class and cross-nationally?
3. How are family structures transformed due to migration and mobility? How are the bonds of immigrant families affected by structures that are not nuclear?

Marriage, cohabitation and parenthood

From Mannis' (1999) paper, we can see that the ongoing agency-structure debate that goes nowhere has hit also family studies. She refers to the stories of those who’s, according to her, “movement toward motherhood is an agentic oddyssey” (p. 126). What is agentic that is found in those well-employed, well-educated women with resources that is not agentic of those in worse conditions? Is it structure? Is it just that access to adoption and reproductive technology is more expensive? Are poor single mothers having children because they are less agentic? What does she mean? I am not sure if poor single mothers are less agentic, according to Valerie Mannis, and what would this imply, if true. She writes: “one can only imagine how much more ‘tough’ it must be for women with less advantages and fewer options” (p. 126). Of course having children is hard, and of course it is more difficult to be a parent with fewer resources. I wish she had done a true comparative study that could thus illuminate on the biases of this study.
After watching the videos, I have two brief comments. One, to what extent children’s social construction of marriage is changing and how is the media, especially TV, affecting children’s understanding and conceptualization of marriage? Second, I found interesting that in “The Defenders” the judge is a woman who has a bible and a flag of the US. I think that this talks about institutions and structures responsible for growing stigma against non-traditional families, about control and manipulation. What is the role of religion in defining marriage roles, attitudes and behaviors? In this sense, it is interesting what Le Bourdais and Lapierre-Adamcyk (2004) note in the comparison of Quebec and the rest of Canada with the United States and Sweden: “this cultural difference partly explains the divergent trends in cohabitation observed in Quebec and in the rest of Canada, but cannot account for the fact that Quebeckers now closely resemble their Swedish counterparts, who were not influenced by the Catholic Church. We argue that much of the evolution observed in Quebec has to do with changes in men’s and women’s roles” (p. 940).

1) In accounting for different patterns in cohabitation, motherhood, parenting and same-sex couples, how much can be explained by legal, cultural and economic factors?
2) How do you interpret the factors accounting for different relative risks of family disruption by type of union and region of residence (Le Bourdais & Lapierre-Adamcyk, 2004, 937)? What is the value of the marriage certificate? What are the causes and consequences of getting a paper certifying a union? What are the possible selection biases of marriage, cohabitation and parenthood?
3) Hochschild analyses the reactions of the ad for a personal assistant. If you are told that the man received thousands of applications, then would you read different her text? Do you blame the “offer” or the “demand” side of this labor-market transaction? Are married women living conditions of “personal assistants” only different to the one he is looking in the ad because sex is involved?

Research Paper Proposal

International migration implicitly means people leaving behind family members. Depending on the context and legal framework, while some temporary workers need to migrate alone and are forced to return to their home country where relatives have remained, permanent immigrants may move along with others. Countries have different policies for those that want to reunite with family members that have migrated previously, as well as regulations for dependents to enter the labor market or have access to certain rights and services. It has been shown that family structure and household living arrangements are important factors for immigrant integration and for their children’s future.
For most of the twentieth century, most migrants to the United States from Mexico were temporary, moving for seasonal work and returning to the communities where the rest of the family had remained. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Mexican migration to the United States has taken on an increasingly permanent character as migrants obtained year-round jobs and were joined by other family members. A flow that was before mainly composed of males migrating alone has been changed to include an increasing number of women and children. In terms of living arrangements and family structures, it has been shown that recent Mexican immigrants in the US are more likely to live in extended family or non-kin households than nonimmigrant households in the US and Mexico.
In this paper I am interested in analyzing family structures and living arrangements of Mexicans in Canada, a recent destination, and comparing these to the patterns in the United States, the traditional destination. I would expect differences that can be attributed to Canadian immigration policy, the maturity of the flow and selection of immigrants. My main objective will be to describe first the phenomena and give possible explanation of how to disentangle the interaction of the sources of these differences. The specific research questions of this paper are: how do household and family structures of immigrants differ in the United States and Canada? How does immigration policy differ in terms of family reunification and migration of dependents? How are Mexicans living in Canada in terms of their family and household structures and how do these differences relate to age, gender, socio-economic status, human capital and time since arrival? The first two questions will be informed by a literature review while the third question will be answered using a statistical analysis of the complete confidential set of individual records of the Canadian 2001 and 2006 censuses. Due to time limitations, I will use secondary data and published results for the United States in order to focus on the analysis on Canada.

Family and intimacy

I am skeptical to arguments of causality in general. Whether the diversification of family setups is a cause or consequence off changing attitudes about intimacy, love and commitment lacks of interest for me if the mechanisms and processes are not disentangled. I agree with the idea that explanations should be analyzed using individual, psychological, economic, social and cultural frameworks, as well as with a historical perspective. In this sense, one of the issues that the readings of this week miss, from my point of view, is the role of social networks, specially extended families and local communities. Capitalism seems to be the responsible for individualism and commercialization of intimate life, but what other factors have transformed the roles of neighbors, extended family members, religious institutions and others as sources of support. For example, in the case of migrant families that leave extended family behind, it is natural to create new relationships with friends. Roseneil and Budgeon explore the individualization thesis and the queering of the social thesis and argue that instead of studying the redefinitions of the family, “the exploration of networks and flows of intimacy and care, the extent and pattern of such networks, the viscosity and velocity of such flows, and the implications of their absence, is likely to prove much more fruitful for future research” (2004, p. 153). How do social network resources differ by class and socioeconomic status? In this sense, I would argue that just like in other sociological debates that suffer of the discussion between structure and agency, the social networks framework is useful to understanding social processes and transformations.
About the discussion of love, intimacy and sexuality, I would recover what Giddens talks about romantic and passionate love. If the ideals of love where connected to moral values of Christianity, what happens when Christianity looses power? Is it the case only that sexuality and love are disconnected from morality or is it the case that morality is transformed? How can we get rid of this double morality of what should be and what is good? Giddens also notes that the rise of romantic love coincided with the emergence of the novel and that the romantic literature, which was mainly written by women, is both an expression of weakness and hope. Have the romantic novels transformed into women advice books (also mainly written by women) due to the ‘commercialization of intimate life’ or because Hollywood, popular television and other media has been teaching us how to have sex and those in the writing business do not want to stay away and make us feel we are part of a reality show by telling us how live our wedding day? If, as Hochschild says “cultures differ in the pictures they project of ‘perfect love’” (2003, p. 122), how these different pictures have been portrayed through time and to what extent these cultural preferences act like structural barriers?
Q1. While reading Hochschild, the issue of selection comes always to my mind. Who do you think reads the advice books? Would a policy recommendation be to promote personalized psychological therapy while telling women not to read advice books or at least saying to read them critically?
Q2. Is intimacy a public good? Why do we care? Shouldn’t that stay in the private sphere?
Q3. How can culture dissociate moral values from family arrangements and sexuality? Would this be helpful to put less stress on gays and lesbians, single mothers, cohabitating couples, childless women, and others?

Feminism, Race, Class, and Care Perspectives

According to Ferree (2010), there have been theoretical advances in the gender perspective since the macro-micro dynamic is central and considers gender as a social relation: “rejects gender as a static norm or ideal (the so-called gender role), and instead defines gender as a social relation characterized by power inequalities that hierarchically produce, organize, and evaluate masculinities and femininities through the contested but controlling practices of individuals, organizations, and societies” (p. 424). However, I am not sure that the gender perspective from Ferree or Pyke’s (1996) exposition of the multilayered relationship between social class, race and sexuality consider the social relation of women with other women.
Pyke (1996) differentiates men in terms of their occupation as lower class versus middle and upper class but seems to leave out women’s social class assuming it is the same as the husband’s. She argues that “for the sake of clarity, however, I have centered this discussion almost exclusively on white, heterosexual, class-based masculinities. The construction of femininities can perhaps best be understood in relation to men” (p. 546). Is this true? Shouldn’t the construction of femininities consider also how women relate with each other for or against the enforcement of gender differences, or inequalities as feminists prefer to say? Arlie Hochschild talks in the introduction about her relationship with her mother and how that shaped her career and personal life. This supports my point of studying gender and femininities also with a women-women perspective.
Another point I would like the readings of this week to cover is the women in power and female politics participation. I was living in the United States during the past elections and it was interesting to read and hear different comments about Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. These comments ranged from the “soccer mom” to the comprehensive and supportive woman that forgives his husband after the Lewinsky scandal, and so on. Another example illustrative of the relation of women with other women and of women in power comes from the Argentinean case. The current president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, an attractive woman with a strong character and wife of the former president (if you have never heard about her: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristina_Fern%C3%A1ndez_de_Kirchner) won the election (45.3% of the vote) followed by another woman, Elisa Carrió (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisa_Carri%C3%B3), conservative and less attractive (with 22% of the vote). During the campaigns, at some point the female electorate was more inclined for Carrió and there were reports about the fear and distrust that women felt for Fernández. The male electorate preferred Cristina Fernández. Much of the discussion in the US and Argentinian cases were centered in female and male stereotypes. But stereotypes are hard to change and are there to remain long time. I am not convinced from the readings that feminist studies, the gender perspective and the race and class perspectives can help us break stereotypes.
Questions:
1) Do you agree with Connell that “all forms of femininity are constructed in the context of the overall subordination of women to men” (Pyke, 1996, p. 546)?
2) Isn’t it easier to talk about men and masculinities than it is to talk about us? Isn’t it easier to criticize others than being auto critical? Why are the authors of the acting manuals for women that Hochschild (2003) analyses mainly women?
3) To what extent current research enforces or reduces stereotypes of social relationships? How can our own research agendas challenge this?

Theoretical perspectives of the family

I am very sure we will all write this week criticizing Talcott Parsons for saying that our “primary status-carrying role is in a sense that of housewife” (1942, p. 609) and that the strain of this duty and insecurity will translate into neurotic behavior. We could argue that things have changed in these seventy years since 1942. I do not agree with Parsons; however I believe that many of his views are still present in many women’s and men’s minds. It is true that the roles of the sexes have changed, but much is constant. For Parsons the working mother and stay home father, homosexuals, single parents, divorced and cohabitating couples are all ‘disfunctional’. But the “swell guy” and the “glamour girl” patterns are still around and have been reinforced by much of the culture and media that developed countries has exported to the rest of the world. The existence of homophobia is just one example that many still believe on Parson’s adult sex roles. Where do LGBT fit? What are the desirable outcomes or life expectations of many?

Yes, women and men are different biologically because our bodies are different and perform different functions. Men cannot have children and I am very sure this has implications on the levels of different hormones and other chemicals in our bodies. Just as what we eat, where we live, genetics and what we do will have effects on the ways our body deals with the different chemicals, hormones, etc. Booth, Carver and Granger’s arguments (2000) search causal relationships that I am unsure you can actually isolate. For example, they say “testosterone-related los occupational success was attributable in part to testosterone-related antisocial behavior during adolescence that got the young men into trouble at school” (p. 1027). What does this imply? I do not know what the implications for intervention were if they were thinking intervention was needed. For me, the issue of the tabula rasa (Steven Pinker, TED talk) and socialization versus biology cannot take us far in understanding the complexity of family theories.

I sympathize with the demographic and life course perspective and the implications that Becker’s models have for empirical research. I agree with Aldous that “life course analysis has forced us to consider how societal events affect the families experiencing them as well as changes in the family institution over broad sweeps of time” (1990, p. 579). While the life course perspective has been criticized for its overcomplexity and the Economics approaches (like Becker’s) have been denounced for its simplicity in the assumptions, I argue that it’s our challenge to deal with multidimensional phenomena with complementary approaches. In this sense, I agree with Ben-Porah that all theories should by “confronted by evidence, by skeptics, and by alternative theories” (1982, p. 62).

1) How are Parsons’ ideas transmitted by the educational system, the media, religion, the rearing of children, etc? How are these ideas different in different cultures in the world?
2) In a future, if the biosocial perspective of the family prospers in academic research, do you think people will discuss the prescription of hormones to prevent couples from divorcing or to encourage women to have children? Where do choices and values fit in this intervention model?
3) How do we deal, as academics, with the different theoretical perspectives in order to study our research problem? How can we convey different approaches into our research to deal with the multidimensionality of the issues and alternative explanations?

Is the 'family' in decline?

First of all, the debate we read for this class which is part of what has been called ‘the family wars’ reflect contested issues in the social sciences (modern versus postmodern theories, small versus large n studies) and bad practices (rhetoric and ideology versus empirical testing, personal opinions versus evidence). The debate is already thirty years old and I wonder how this discussion has changed to date in academic research.

Second, the readings reflect also a major problem in bad research: concluding causality. Popenoe’s arguments are full of causal links that have not been tested. For Popenoe, each of the five dimensions of the family decline is cumulative and causes each other but he does not provide a sound study of the mechanisms that may produce this and that would link family risk factors with the outcomes. In this sense, I agree with Cowan when he reminds the readers that correlation does not prove causation and that Popenoe fails to “consider alternative causal hypotheses, especially those at levels of analysis other than antichild and antifamily values” (1993, p. 549). If Popenoe would have provided a serious research account, he would have had to consider in his analysis important historical, economic, political, technological, social and cultural transformations that may shape family and fertility patterns.

Third, when Arlie Hochschild (1991) writes “Wallerstein does not compare children of divorce with a matched sample of children from intact marriages” (p. 3) she points out a major flaw in the family wars: what is the counterfactual? What are the appropriate comparison groups? I would say this needs a further thought.

Finally, the set of readings remind me a problematic in social policy: the unclear division of the private and public spheres. Can we enforce people to have a certain number of children? Should we even think of enforcing people to live with someone? What are the implications of designing family and fertility policy? Is the purpose to reduce risk factors or to impose values?

Questions.

1. What is the impact that policy has on family and fertility outcomes? How can we better design policy that respects the private decisions of individuals but offers means to reduce risks? For example, is legalizing abortion a way of reducing family, health and psychological risks?
2. What are the legal, social, cultural, economic, political differences that have made Canada and the US similar or different in terms of family outcomes?
3. What has more recent empirical research found on the changes in the five dimensions that alarmed Popenoe and that fueled the ‘family wars’?