By Tamar Kremer-Sadlik
Director of Research

The Center on the Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) is an interdisciplinary research project involving scholars from Anthropology (Linguistic; Cultural-Medical; Psychosocial; and Archaeology), Clinical Psychology, Applied Linguistics, and Education. Employing a variety of research methodologies from these fields, this project documents working families' everyday lives through the collection of various types of data including: tracking and videotaping of family members over a period of one week; conducting semi-structured interviews with family members; measuring Cortisol (stress hormone) in saliva samples; administering psychological measures; mapping families' homes; and documenting (photographing) artifacts and other materials in the home.

The Center's overarching concern is how family and household activities help members of dual earner middle class families to cohere and thrive as a working entity. To this end, CELF documents how middle class working parents, their children, and others in their social networks collaborate in and across a spectrum of activities that reflect and construct valued ways of acting, communicating, thinking, and feeling. The Center analyzes how day-to-day family communication and interaction socialize family members into ideologies and practices concerning physical and emotional health, learning and development, financial stability, upkeep and esthetics of the home and person, and moral responsibilities. Research projects address some of the following issues: division of labor in the home, family togetherness, family reunion, child-dominated family life, storage and clutter crisis, dinnertime and meal preparation, parental multitasking, media and technology in the home, family engagement in children's extra-curricular activities, and perspectives on family time.

Please visit the Center's web site at http://www.celf.ucla.edu/.