By Barbara Schneider and Linda J. Waite
Co-Directors of the Alfred P. Sloan Family Center on Parents, Work and Children

In the 1950s, the typical American family was a "nuclear" family: mom was a homemaker, dad worked, and the children went to school. Mom saw to the meals, dad fixed the car, mom did the laundry, dad cleaned the gutters. These roles and their boundaries were tightly woven into America's social fabric. Now, more than 40 years later, the weave has loosened and the threads have tangled: in most households both parents work outside the home; homemaking chores that were once solely the woman's responsibility are now shared by both partners and the children.

We need to better understand the social fabric of today's families. How do dual career families balance work and family responsibilities? How are children spending their supervised and unsupervised time? How are values transmitted to children? What roles do schools and the media play in the social and moral development of children?
Today's families must be flexible and able to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances, but these changing circumstances make them more vulnerable to pressures both from within and without. The issues facing parents, children, families, employers, and schools are intricate and complex, and they are at the heart of the Alfred P. Sloan Family Center on Parents, Children & Work at The University of Chicago and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC).

As part of a network of six Sloan Working Family Centers, the Chicago Center was founded to examine the issues facing working parents and their children by taking a different approach to conceptually defining the research issues and exploring new research methodologies. Studying these issues requires that we understand the dynamics of working families not only from the perspective of adults in the household, but also through the voices of the children. The complex dynamics of this century's working family cannot be understood through just one approach, they require interdisciplinary approaches such as those employed by The University of Chicago and NORC. The University of Chicago was founded to enhance opportunities for interdisciplinary study, and as a University affiliate, NORC pursues this goal vigorously. Faculty from psychology, sociology, economics, child development, human development, and public policy are collaborating on this work. The Center is directed by Barbara Schneider and Linda Waite, whose research expertise explores family, marriage, adolescents, and education issues.

The center most recently completed an original data collection involving 500 families: 300 families with teenage children and 200 families with kindergarten-age children. In order to accomplish this massive data collection task, we trained and employed the interviewing skills of close to 40 graduate students, advanced undergraduates, post-doctoral fellows and faculty members.

Families with teenage children were drawn from 7 cities across the United States. Families with kindergarten-age children were drawn from 3 local sites. With one exception, the study sites were also used in the Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development, a longitudinal study of adolescents conducted from 1992-1997. The sites were selected to allow follow up with a small number of families from the Alfred P. Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development.

Sixty-three families from the Study of Youth and Social Development consented to participate in the working family study. The remaining families were recruited through the schools and solicitations by phone, mail, and newspaper advertisements.
Data collection included surveys, qualitative interviews, standardized child assessments, and the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). The ESM is a signal-contingent data collection method in which participants wear specially programmed wristwatches that signal them to answer brief questionnaires at randomly chosen moments throughout the day for a 7-day period. To validate the data collected by the ESM, two experiments, based on standard time diary methods were conducted during the course of the study. The results of these experiments are being used to compare the findings of ESM with other forms of time diary data collections.

Barbara Schneider and Linda J. Waite have published a book based on the Five Hundred Family Study called Being Together, Working Apart: Dual-Career Families and the Work-Life Balance. Please visit http://www.cambridge.org for ordering information.