With two-and-a-half years of observation behind them,
researchers at UCLA are deep into a study on the everyday lives of
middle-class families in the United States.
Professors from various fields at UCLA came together through the
Center on Everyday Lives of Families to examine the habits of
middle-class working families through videos, photographs,
interviews and saliva samples.
The development and data collection for the study have taken the
past four years, and analysis of the information will likely last
indefinitely.
The study may evoke images of wildlife observation shows on the
Discovery Channel, but with middle-class humans as study subjects
rather than tigers and zebras.
Tami Kremer-Sadlik, the director of research at the center, also
compared the project to reality television ““ but with the
purpose of research rather than entertainment.
“This is like reality TV in the sense that we are there
when they live their lives,” she said.
The families had to meet a certain set of criteria, but there
was also a great deal of racial diversity within the study group,
and two of the families had same-sex parents.
Each family had to consist of two parents who worked more than
30 hours a week, had two or three children, and owned a home and
paid mortgage.
The families applied to participate in the study and received
$1,000 to do it, Kremer-Sadlik said.
Researchers were extremely detailed in their observations,
recording information as specific as what objects each family
member uses and the content of their saliva at given times
throughout the day to study hormones.
Observers began filming early in the morning, watching as
families got ready for work and school.
The camera rolled in the evening as families prepared dinner,
ate their meal, did their homework and got ready for bed.
All filming was done during times when several family members
were together.
In total, they collected over 1,500 hours of film, 50 hours from
each family, said Rena Repetti, a professor of psychology who
worked on the study.
“We really attempt to get a good idea of what their life
looks like,” Kremer-Sadlik said.
Though the study had many different aspects, the bulk of the
data was collected on film.
“The core of the study is the videotaping
component,” Repetti said, but other methods were brought in
for a more complete collection of data.
Each of the researchers brought in their specific expertise and
experience from different fields, Repetti said.
“The other researchers added different components so that
the result was truly an interdisciplinary study,” she
said.
In addition to the film, photographers took pictures of objects
in the family’s house, collecting tens of thousands of
photos.
Each family member was interviewed ““ children were asked
about their day at school and their perceptions of life at home
while parents were asked about their ideologies, opinions and
social interactions.
“We interview the parents on their daily routine … on
their ideas of education, their social network,”
Kremer-Sadlik said.
In an attempt to get even more precise, researchers followed and
recorded the movements of each family member within the house to
ascertain their use of space.
“We also track them in their home,” Kremer-Sadlik
said. “We track and document in 10-minute intervals who is
where, doing what with whom.”
The researchers not only recorded where each family member was
and who they were with, but also what objects in the house they
were using, making for a detailed and massive collection of
information.
“We wanted to get a sense not only of the use of the
house, the artifacts, but their interaction with one
another,” Kremer-Sadlik said.
Researchers have completed the process of collecting information
from 32 families and are now taking the first steps in analyzing
the information.
“We just completed data collection in January, so
we’re just now at the point when we can begin to examine
(the) data,” said Rena Repetti, a professor of psychology at
UCLA who worked on the study. “We’ve only begun to take
a little peek.”
This part of the study, examining and analyzing the collection
of video and other information, will likely last for quite a while,
Repetti said.
The researchers are in the most preliminary stage of this long
interpretive process and have begun to make some initial
observations on family interactions.
One of the early observations researchers have made is about
family greetings and the role of the man in the home. Based on the
study, it seems that children are often too absorbed in their own
activities to greet their fathers.
“When the fathers come in … 50 percent of the time (the
children) ignore them as they’re walking though the house,
and that seems to be quite striking,” Kremer-Sadlik said.
“The children are distracted by what they’re doing.
… They’re not stopping their activity to say hello,”
she added.
This may be symptomatic of a larger problem of isolation within
families that one researcher observed.
Marjorie Goodwin, an anthropology professor at UCLA, pointed to
a general trend in children being more absorbed in solitary
activities in their free time than they have been in the past.
And when it comes to free time, children in middle-class
families, even as young as elementary school age, seem to have less
and less.
Rather than creating their own activities and filling their time
as they choose, children in middle-class families lead very
structured lives, Goodwin said.
This fits in with a sense that families are packing more and
more activities into their scheduling and leaving less time for
leisure.
Another aspect of the study was the relationship between husband
and wife within the household.
They looked at how couples negotiate and the perception of the
roles in regard to division of labor in the home, Kremer-Sadlik
said.
One of their principal findings was that women seemed to bear
the brunt of the labor.
But these observations are only in the most rudimentary stages,
and many more are yet to come.
Before further conclusions about middle-class life can be made,
researchers must catalogue every minute ““ in fact every
second ““ of tape that has been recorded to break it down into
meaningful sections.
Repetti said she and her colleagues are now recording who is
where at each moment of recording. This process will also allow
them to select which family members they would like to study and
pull up only footage that pertains to them.
“It’s a first task to simply get us to the point
where we can create a library of videotapes that are meaningful for
our purpose,” Repetti said.
With reports from Jennifer Mishory, Bruin
contributor.