Cutting-edge research methods, an interdisciplinary faculty
staff and a desire to create and use a rich database of information
on the lives of working families have fused in the shape of the
UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families.
The center recently completed a research endeavor in which the
daily lives of 32 L.A. area working families were videotaped for
the duration of one week, resulting in over 1,500 hours of video
footage and the creation of a data set with the potential to result
in several studies.
The center at UCLA was founded in 2001 under sponsorship by the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program on dual-career working
middle-class families, and is one of six Sloan Centers on working
families located at major universities throughout the country.
The roots of the center were planted in 1994, when the Sloan
Foundation established a major program with the primary goal of
understanding what went on within American working families, said
Kathleen Christensen, the New York-based Sloan Foundation’s
director of the program on the workplace, workforce and working
families.
The UCLA-based center was created with multiple goals, according
to its mission statement. These obejctives include integrating
scholars from an array of fields to conduct ethnographic research
on the home lives of middle-class working families, creating a
digital and video archive of the activities of those families and
apprenticing scholars at all levels to this new and different type
of research.
“One of the primary goals of our center was twofold: to
create the next generation of scholarship and to create the next
generation of scholars,” Christensen said.
“At the outset I very much wanted some of these centers to
be headed by anthropologists,” Christensen said, noting that
the anthropological perspective is highly useful for the purposes
of the program because it provides a special insight into family
life.
The establishment of a center at UCLA was greatly helped by the
quality of the faculty available here, Christensen said. She added
that she was attracted to UCLA because of anthropology professor
and center director Elinor Ochs.
“She’s a tremendous scholar who has done very
important and interesting work on rituals within families,”
Christensen said.
A key element within the center at UCLA has been utilizing the
range of faculty expertise available at the university.
“The center was designed to bring together faculty to do a
study on middle class dual-earner families,” said Rena
Repetti, associate professor of psychology and part of the
center’s core faculty.
Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, the center’s research director, also
touched on the importance of drawing from a span of faculty
knowledge.
“We designed it to be interdisciplinary,”
Kremer-Sadlik said, noting that the center has representatives from
areas of knowledge ranging from education studies and psychology to
applied linguistics and anthropology.
The broad knowledge base the center has to work with will come
in handy with the data collected and the remaining analysis.
“A number of studies focused on the ethnography of everyday
life within families” will now be conducted, Christensen
said.
She noted that the vast amounts of video recordings the center
has collected is in effect a vast database of information that will
birth multiple future studies on elements from the archaeology of
the items within the homes to studies on the greetings used by
family members.
“The video ethnography really represents one of the very
richest data sets” available for this kind of study of
working families, Christensen said.
“Students are going to be doing their dissertations off
that data set,” Christensen said.
A variety of methods, including computer mapping of behavioral
patterns and observations of storage tendencies, will be used to
examine the newly collected data set, which opens up the
opportunity to study a number of different aspects of family life,
Christensen said.
With reports by Sara Taylor, Bruin reporter.