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Photography by Reed Hutchinson
UCLA Photographic Services
CELF director Elinor Ochs with students transcribing research
materials on 32 middle-class, working families in Los Angeles.
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Center looks at middle-class families
How working parents cope
BY WENDY SODERBURG
UCLA Today Staff
In what could be viewed as the ultimate reality show, scientists
at UCLA’s Center on the Everyday Lives of Families (CELF)
visited 32 working families at home in Los Angeles and videotaped
them for a week.
The taping was part of an extensive, data-collecting process that
is allowing researchers to study a modern American phenomenon: how
middle-class parents are coping with the dual challenges of working
outside the home and raising a family.
Researchers fitted parents and children with wireless microphones
and videotaped them inside their homes. They administered ethnographic
questionnaires and even collected saliva samples to test their stress
levels.
“This is beyond reality,” said CELF director Elinor
Ochs. “A reality show is not reality because they go back
to the cutting room, paste the thing together and put a narrative
overlay on it. But this is unedited. This is real.”
CELF was established four years ago with a $3.6-million grant from
the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The research team — a multidisciplinary
mix of anthropologists, archaeologists, clinical psychologists,
and applied-linguistic and education specialists — set out
to study aspects of everyday life for the 32 ethnically diverse
families, who applied for the study by responding to ads in the
Los Angeles Times and various community newspapers. The families
had to be middle-class, own their own homes and include two or three
children, with at least one child between the ages of 8 and 10.
Most important, both parents had to work full-time outside the home.
The researchers were very specific in their observations. For example,
archaeologist Jeanne Arnold noted a “clutter crisis”
in many of the families’ homes after examining their garages
as part of her research. She found that it was fairly rare for people
to use their garages for cars; instead, garages were filled to the
rafters with toys, furniture, bicycles and refrigerators. “These
material objects are almost choking the family,” Ochs said.
Anthony Graesch, a graduate student in archaeology, worked with
Ochs and clinical psychologists Rena Repetti and Thomas Bradbury
on a “family cohesion” study, in which they observed
how often family members were together at home. In an initial analysis
of the first 20 families, Graesch discovered that family members
were together in the same room in only 16% of the tracking observations.
Worse still, the two parents found time to be alone together only
6% of the time. “That has a lot of consequences for the kind
of communication you would find,” said Ochs, a linguistic
anthropologist who won a 1998 MacArthur Fellowship.
Another study involved observing the moment when parents came home
from work and reconnected with the rest of the family. In most cases
these were the fathers, because the mothers were usually the ones
who left work early to pick up the kids. “Very few times were
the dads greeted when they got home,” Ochs said. In fact,
“only a third of the time were the dads greeted, or even acknowledged.”
What was striking, Ochs added, was that while the children continued
with their activities, the ignored parent usually accepted their
behavior. “American families are very child-centered,”
she said. “But it may have reached a tipping point where perhaps
we’ve moved from being child-centered to being child-dominated.”
With the data-collection phase completed, Ochs and the CELF staff
are uploading the results of their research onto the center’s
server, and much of it is already available for analysis. More information
about the center and its research projects can be found at www.celf.ucla.edu.
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