Tag Archives | Family

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Amid the changes that have diversified family life, studies have shown the continuing importance of attachment to kin through established patterns such as ties among full siblings and newer patterns such as efforts by donor-conceived individuals to find their donor siblings. Sociologists have good explanations for the diversity of family forms but not for the persistence of kinship ties. This article argues that evolutionary processes focused on genetic relatedness can provide a partial explanation for both the persistence and expansion of kinship ties. It proposes that the easing of social constraints on family-related behaviors and the resulting expansion of choices may have increased the importance of genetic relatedness in producing the current patterns. To illustrate this perspective, this article examines the consistency between patterns of financial assistance to kin and Hamilton’s rule, derived from the evolutionary theory of inclusive fitness, using the 1985 to 2019 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Andrew J. Cherlin: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: cherlin@jhu.edu

Acknowledgements: I thank Dalton Conley, Frank Furstenberg, Rosemary Hopcroft, and Robert Schoen for comments on previous drafts. Data and analysis files are available at the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, project number is openicpsr-193132.

Citation: Cherlin, Andrew J. 2023. “Evolutionary Influences on Assistance to Kin: Evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.” Sociological Science 10: 964-988.
Received: June 21, 2023
Accepted: August 10, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Werner Raub
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a34

Marriage, Kids, and the Picket Fence? Household Type and Wealth among U.S. Households, 1989 to 2019

By Parker Webservices on April 25, 2022 in Articles

Christine Percheski, Christina Gibson-Davis

Sociological Science April 25, 2022
10.15195/v9.a7

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Evidence on how parenthood affects household wealth in the United States has been inconclusive, partially because previous studies have decontextualized parenthood from gender, marital, and relationship status. Yet, insights from economic sociology suggest that wealth-related behaviors are shaped by the intersection of identities, not by a binary classification of parental status. We examine net worth by the intersection of gender, parental, and relationship status during a period of increasing wealth inequality and family diversification. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances from 1989 through 2019, we show that aggregate comparisons between parents and non-parents mask substantial wealth variation across nine household types. Despite changing social selection into marriage and parenthood, married parents consistently held a wealth advantage over demographically similar adults in other household types. Married parents’ wealth advantage descriptively arises from homeownership, perhaps because the combined spousal and parental identities are normatively and culturally associated with homeownership.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Christine Percheski: Department of Sociology, Northwestern University
E-mail: c-percheski@northwestern.edu

Christina Gibson-Davis: Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University
E-mail: cgibson@duke.edu

Acknowledgments: We gratefully acknowledge funding from the National Science Foundation (award 1459631) and advice from Sara McLanahan, Michael Hout, Michelle Weinberger, and several anonymous reviewers.

Citation: Percheski, Christine, and Christina Gibson-Davis. 2022. “Marriage, Kids, and the Picket Fence? Household Type and Wealth among U.S. Households, 1989 to 2019.” Sociological Science 9: 159-183.
Received: March 10, 2021
Accepted: April 30, 2022
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Vida Maralani
DOI: 10.15195/v9.a7

Pretrial Detention and the Costs of System Overreach for Employment and Family Life

By Parker Webservices on August 17, 2020 in Articles

Sara Wakefield, Lars Højsgaard Andersen

Sociological Science August 17, 2020
10.15195/v7.a14

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Using unique Danish register data that allow for comparisons across both conviction and incarceration status, this article analyzes the association between pretrial detention and work, family attachment, and recidivism. We find that pretrial detention may impose unique social costs, apart from conviction or additional punishments. Most notably, men who are detained pretrial experience poorer labor market trajectories than men who are convicted of a crime (but not incarcerated). Importantly, this result holds even for men who are detained pretrial but who are not convicted of the crime. Consistent with prior research, we also find that pretrial detention is unrelated to later family formation but might disrupt preexisting household arrangements. Finally, the associations between pretrial detention and work and family life are not counterbalanced by reductions in recidivism.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Sara Wakefield: School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, Newark
E-mail: sara.wakefield@rutgers.edu

Lars Højsgaard Andersen: ROCKWOOL Foundation Research Unit
E-mail: lha@rff.dk

Acknowledgments: We thank Robert Apel and Christopher Wildeman for helpful comments and the ROCKWOOL Foundation for their support of this research.

Citation: Wakefield, Sara, and Lars Højsgaard Andersen. 2020. “Pretrial Detention and the Costs of System Overreach for Employment and Family Life.” Sociological Science 7: 342-366.
Received: April 18, 2020
Accepted: June 20, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a14

Gender Flexibility, but not Equality: Young Adults’ Division of Labor Preferences

By Parker Webservices on January 21, 2020 in Articles

Brittany N. Dernberger, Joanna R. Pepin

Sociological Science January 21, 2020
10.15195/v7.a2

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Rising acceptance of mothers’ labor force participation is often considered evidence of increased support for gender equality. This approach overlooks perceptions of appropriate behavior for men and gender dynamics within families. We use nationally representative data of 12th-grade students from Monitoring the Future surveys (1976 to 2014) to evaluate changes in youths’ preferred division of labor arrangements. Over this period, contemporary young people exhibited greater openness to a variety of division of labor scenarios for their future selves as parents, although the husband-as-earner/wife-as-homemaker arrangement remained most desired. Using latent class analysis, we identify six configurations of gender attitudes: conventionalists, neotraditionalists, conventional realists, dual earners, intensive parents, and strong intensive parents. There are no gender egalitarian configurations—exhibiting equal support for both parents’ time at work and time at home. Our findings indicate researchers must distinguish between adoption of gender egalitarian principles and gender flexibility in dividing time at work and at home.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Brittany N. Dernberger: Department of Sociology, University of Maryland
E-mail: bdernber@terpmail.umd.edu

Joanna R. Pepin: Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin
E-mail: JPepin@prc.utexas.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank Kelly Raley, Melissa Milkie, Philip Cohen, and Sarah Flood for generously reading previous versions and providing invaluable feedback. This article was presented at the University of Maryland’s Gender,Work, and Family/Stratification working group, the Family Demography working group at the University of Texas, and at the 2018 American Sociological Association’s annual conference. We thank all the audience participants for their thoughtful comments. Replication code for data access and all paper analyses are available at https://osf.io/m3xwy/.

This research was supported by grant P2CHD042849, Population Research Center, and grant T32HD007081, Training Program in Population Studies, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin; and grant P2CHD041041, Maryland Population Research Center, awarded to the University of Maryland, by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Citation: Dernberger, Brittany N., and Joanna R. Pepin. 2020. “Gender Flexibility, but not Equality: Young Adults’ Division of Labor Preferences.” Sociological Science 7: 36-56.
Received: November 20, 2019
Accepted: December 14, 2019
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a2

Mass Imprisonment and the Extended Family

By Parker Webservices on June 14, 2018 in Articles

Pil H. Chung, Peter Hepburn

Sociological Science, June 14, 2018
10.15195/v5.a15

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This study employs microsimulation techniques to provide an accounting of exposure to imprisoned or formerly imprisoned kin. We characterize the risk and prevalence of imprisonment within full kinship networks and find that the life course trajectories of familial imprisonment experienced by black and white Americans take on qualitatively distinct forms: the average black American born at the height of the prison boom experienced the imprisonment of a relative for the first time at age 7 and by age 65 belongs to a family in which more than 1 in 7 working-age relatives have ever been imprisoned. By contrast, the average white American who experiences the imprisonment of a relative does not do so until age 39 and by age 65 belongs to a family in which 1 in 20 working-age relatives have ever been imprisoned. Future reductions in imprisonment rates have the potential to meaningfully reduce these racial disparities in family imprisonment burden.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Pil H. Chung: Departments of Sociology and Demography, University of California, Berkeley
E-mail: pchung@berkeley.edu

Peter Hepburn: Departments of Sociology and Demography, University of California, Berkeley
E-mail: pshepburn@demog.berkeley.edu

Acknowledgements: We gratefully acknowledge David Harding, Kristin Turney, Sandra Susan Smith, Daniel Schneider, Christopher Wildeman, Robert Pickett, and Elayne Oliphant for the invaluable advice and feedback they provided at various stages of this work.

Citation: Chung, Pil H., and Peter Hepburn. 2018. “Mass Imprisonment and the Extended Family.” Sociological Science 5: 335-360.
Received: March 29, 2018
Accepted: April 24, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen Morgan
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a15

A Taste of Inequality: Food's Symbolic Value across the Socioeconomic Spectrum

By Parker Webservices on August 10, 2017 in Articles

Priya Fielding-Singh

Sociological Science, August 10, 2017
DOI 10.15195/v4.a17

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Scholars commonly account for dietary disparities across socioeconomic status (SES) using structural explanations that highlight differences in individuals’ wealth, income, or location. These explanations emphasize food’s material value. But food also carries symbolic value. This article shows how food’s symbolic value helps drive dietary disparities. In-depth interviews with 160 parents and adolescents and 80 hours of observations with four families demonstrate how a family’s socioeconomic position in part shapes the meanings that parents attach to food. These differing meanings contribute to distinct feeding strategies across the socioeconomic spectrum: whereas low-SES parents use food to buffer against deprivation, high-SES parents provision food to fulfill classed values around health and parenting. The findings suggest that an understanding of how families’ material circumstances shape food’s symbolic value is critical to fully account for dietary differences across SES.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Priya Fielding-Singh: Department of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Stanford University
Email: priyafs@stanford.edu

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by Stanford University’s Vice Provost for Graduate Education and the Department of Sociology. I thank Tomás Jiménez, Michelle Jackson, Doug McAdam, Jeremy Freese, Christopher Gardner, Marianne Cooper, Caitlin Daniel, Kristine Kilanski, Aliya Rao, Melissa Abad, Jennifer Wang, Anshuman Sahoo, Adrienne Frech, and the students in my course, “The Social Determinants of Health,” for their constructive feedback on various drafts of this article. I am grateful to my collaborators at Hillview Central High School as well as to the families who participated in this research and shared their insights and experiences.

Citation:Fielding-Singh, Priya. 2017. “A Taste of Inequality: Food’s Symbolic Value across the Socioeconomic Spectrum.” Sociological Science 4: 424-448.
Received: June 15, 2017
Accepted: July 2, 2017
Editors: Mario Small
DOI: 10.15195/v4.a17

Disaster, Disruption to Family Life, and Intimate Partner Violence: The Case of the 2010 Earthquake in Haiti

By Jesper Sorensen on March 7, 2016 in Articles

Abigail Weitzman, Julia Andrea Behrman

Sociological Science, March 7, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a9

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Natural disasters have inherently social dimensions because they exacerbate preexisting inequalities and disrupt social norms and institutions. Despite a growing interest in the sociological aspects of disasters, few studies have quantitatively explored how disasters alter intrahousehold family dynamics. In this article, we develop and test a conceptual framework that explicates how natural disasters affect an important component of family life: intimate partner violence (IPV). We combine two waves of geocoded Demographic and Health Surveys data, collected before and after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, with spatial data on variation in the earthquake’s destruction. Our findings indicate that exposure to earthquake devastation increased the probability of both physical and sexual IPV one to two years following the disaster. These increases were accompanied by substantial changes in family functioning, the household economy, and women’s access to their social networks. Select household-level experiences during and after the earthquake, such as displacement, were also positively associated with IPV. These findings provide new insights into the multidimensional effects of disasters on family life and have important theoretical and policy implications that extend beyond the particular case of Haiti.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abigail Weitzman: Population Studies Center, University of Michigan Email: aweitzma@umich.edu

Julia Andrea Behrman: New York University Email: Jab965@nyu.edu

Acknowledgements: This research was made possible with the generous support of the National Science Foundation (grant 2011117755) and theWilliam and Flora Hewlett Foundation/International Institute for Education (grant 2012-7263). Background support was also provided by the grant “Team 1000+ Saving Brain: Economic Impact of Poverty-Related Risk Factors for Cognitive Development and Human Capital” 0072-03 provided to the grantee, the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, by Grand Challenges Canada. We are grateful to Paula England, Jere Behrman, and Dalton Conley for their invaluable feedback on this research. We are also grateful to Himanshu Mistry and New York University’s Data Service Studio for assisting us in our spatial analyses.