This study documents how spouses of Puerto Rican National Guard soldiers appraise the impact of war deployment and separation on their family lives. It examines the coping strategies they found most useful in adjusting to the demands of separation during 1989's Persian Gulf conflict. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods is used in this study. Emotional tension, concern about their husband's safety and having to assume new family roles and full care taking and household responsibilities without their husbands' support and for such a prolonged period of time were reported by wives as the most distressing aspects of separation. In contrast to women who reported having a satisfactory marital relationship, informants who described their marital relationship as poor evaluated the actual period of separation as less distressing than previous periods of military enforced separation. Overall, women in this study were resourceful and strongly committed to overcome the obstacles faced by their families during separation. Coping strategies aimed at maintaining families united were found to be extremely helpful in adapting to separation. Religious values, a positive outlook on life events, and support from family members also contributed to strengthen their capacity to endure separation. Cultural values and social expectations related to the role that traditionally Puerto Rican women play in the family served the respondents as instrumental guidelines for adapting to the demands and strains of prolonged separation. Implications of these findings for planning intervention and support services for military families are discussed.

Recent literature documents the tremendous increase in interest among researchers and educators in family literacy practices and the relationship between the social and academic lives of children. Significant research contributions have also been made by those who have explored more specifically, the role of children's literature within the family context in the lives of children and adults and in their relationships with one another. Other researchers have spent months and years observing, describing, and coding family literacy practices, including a focus on parents and children reading books. Current research offering historical perspectives regarding the role of children's literature in the family context is also critical to our understanding of the ways in which children's literature reflects the time and culture that produces it. The significance of the work of these researchers warrants further exploration regarding specific individual experience with children's literature in the family context. Researchers' explorations of the intricacies of such experience, obtained via the voices of individuals, hold the potential to offer insight which complements, refines and extends the scope of existing research aimed at improving educational practice and informing educational policy. Children's experiences with literature within the family often provide a framework for the kind of experiences that they have later on in other settings. Through in-depth interviewing, this study explores the specific experiences and influences, past and present, of individual participants with regard to children's literature in the family context. Participants explore the meaning of these experiences, and the influences of these experiences in their lives as parents. Through a process of transcribing the interview tapes, crafting participant profiles, and analyzing the data, this researcher then explores the salient issues within individual profiles and among profiles, which may ultimately extend the scope of existing research.

Keenan and Shaw (1997) suggested that gender differences in child and adolescent psychopathology might be related to the socializing of internalizing behaviors in girls. Some studies have suggested that parents respond differentially to some child behaviors depending on the sex of the child. Additionally, other studies support the notion that parents consider male-stereotypic behaviors more problematic in girls. However, past studies have not directly examined parental beliefs about symptoms in girls versus boys or examined how these beliefs relate to actual child symptoms in preschool children. The present study extends existing research by examining whether parents have different beliefs about internalizing and externalizing symptomatology depending on the sex of the child in which the symptom occurs and if these parental beliefs are related to parent and teacher report of child symptoms. The present study found gender differences in parental concern about hypothetical symptoms in girls versus boys in a sample of higher income, European American parents, but found no significant gender differences in a sample of lower income parents from racial and ethnic minority groups. The present study did not obtain significant findings with regard to the relation of these beliefs with parent and teacher report of child symptoms. The importance of conducting such research with diverse participants is discussed.

A recent report from the U.S. Census Bureau revealed that over 5 million or 7% of our nations children are being raised in grandparent headed households. In many of these homes no biological parent resides. Families is which grandparents are raising their grandchildren have become a widespread distinctive familial structure. In fact, between 1980 and 1990 there has been a 44% increase in grandparents raising grandchildren due to issues such as parental substance abuse, child abuse and neglect, teenage pregnancy, and general parental incompetence. This reconfiguration of the family occurs across many socioeconomic and ethnic groups. Over 500 grandparents participated in this study, which explores the complex issues related to the emergence of this contemporary family structure, including parental substance abuse, child abuse, neglect and abandonment, and the critical needs of the children. It is of great importance that the needs and issues of these families are understood, so that they may be addressed through effective social and educational policy that will help insure healthy lives for the next generation of parents and their children.

In recent years, the category “transgender” has evolved to name and describe the identities and experiences of those who transgress traditional categories of sex and gender. Unlike “man” and “woman,” where the boundaries of identity are generally understood to have clear and distinct (although contested) definition, the borders of transgender identity necessarily remain nebulous. This qualitative study focuses on female-bodied individuals who identify as transgender but do not physically change their bodies through surgery or hormonal treatments. There is a conspicuous deficiency of information about female-to-male transsexuals, and especially about female bodied non-transsexuals—those who identify as transgender, but not transsexual. Therefore, it is important to examine not only who chooses to claim this identity and their process of doing so, but how they construct and make meaning of gender in their daily lives. Transgender identity offers an intriguing arena in which to explore the connection between experiences of self, gender, and the body. The specific questions this study addresses include: Why and how do female-bodied people claim a transgender identity? How do they understand their transgender identity? How do they manage and make this identity known? The participants explain how they understand their transgender identity and address the themes of gender identity, gender presentation, and the body.

This study explores the relationships between family and social support and parent-child attachment. It uses an ecological approach to study ten at-risk families in two family support programs in two different cultural settings. The experiences and perspectives of the ten participants in the family support programs inform the study. The participants are mothers with children under five years of age. Five live in the United States and attend a family center. Five live in Ireland and use a home visiting program. The findings of this study are rooted in the unique cultural contexts of the two family support programs and the ten participants, their individual meanings, experiences, and understandings. A qualitative case study approach within the unique cultural contexts of the two family support programs is used. In-depth interviews, observations, surveys, videotaping, and document analysis are the primary research methods used. From these data, the findings are presented using descriptions and contextual details to compile portraits of the participants' experiences and perspectives. Member checks and peer debriefing established trustworthiness. The findings of this study suggest positive relationships between family and social support and parent-child attachment for the ten participants. The social support programs provided emotional support, material support, and information to the participants. Within the context of the family support programs, the participants reported that they experienced positive supportive relationships, a sense of empowerment and positive affirmation that promoted their self-esteem, self-worth and maternal confidence. They experienced non-judgmental support from the staff, opportunities to network and talk, respect for mothers, and models for parenting options and alternatives. Their relationships and interactions with staff and other mothers helped to relieve their depression, reduce their sense of social isolation, foster communication and provide social networks. They also positively affected maternal sensitivities and responsiveness and promoted feelings of self-confidence. The findings suggest that these family support programs aided in the development of parent-child bonds and parent-child attachment for the ten participants in their unique cultural contexts.

This ethnographic study investigates the lived experience of thirty Puerto Rican fathers living in the city of Holyoke, Massachusetts, a city where adolescent birth rates remain high despite declining national trends. All of the fathers were twenty-four years or younger when their children were born; the mothers of their children were adolescents. Study participants were recruited from the lowest income neighborhoods of the city, where the majority of adolescent mothers reside. Information about the experience of fatherhood was obtained by qualitative interviews with these men in their community, researcher participant-observation of selected activities in the neighborhoods, and interviews with teachers, social workers, and extended family members. Key themes that emerged: (1) gender is understood as a fixed and unchanging attribute of persons, (2) despite this understanding, their identity as father is a process of negotiation with the women in these men's lives, (3) mutually planned, intentional pregnancies are common despite difficult economic and social circumstances, (4) “being there” is the most important component of fathering, related to each father's experience with his own father, (5) fathers care deeply how they are “seen” by their children, causing them to consider alternative narrative possibilities for their lives. The narratives of these fathers complicate the absent father discourse of public health and social policy and challenge the boundaries of the dichotomy between troubled and safe masculinities. Three of the thirty men were married at the time of interview; only one associated marriage with children. The influence of the political-economic history of the city as well as the gendered history of welfare and the single mother are brought to bear on how masculinity is constructed by these fathers. Suggestions are made for future applied anthropology research endeavors that legitimate making time and space for fathers to talk about their aspirations as fathers and their vulnerabilities as men.

This is about “eating in” with friends and others. Georg Simmel suggests that eating together is a profound intersection of the social and the individual, since what the individual eats, no one else can eat under any circumstances. This research uses qualitative interviews and participant observations to explore occasions where people inviting non-kin into their households for food and sociability. Using the work of Mary Douglas, Marjorie DeVault, and Pierre Bourdieu, I explore the concrete pleasures and labors of cooking and the discourses of food that shape the experience. When people invite friends, neighbors, or family members to partake of a meal within their household, they are engaging in forms of sociability, delineating lines of intimacy and distance. Chapters describe the events themselves, the shared meal and the sociable moments surrounding it, as well as the performances of self that are created through these everyday interactions. Narratives describe potlucks, dinner parties, buffets and barbecues as social forms that express something about the relationships being enacted. Each involves different degrees of formality, different roles and social expectations for participants, and different divisions of labor in the actual production of the food, the event, and social interactions. People choose to participate in these events as a way of constructing close relationships that are not necessarily rooted in the obligations associated with kinship. Commensality with friends and others is a key component to the ongoing construction of gender and class boundaries in contemporary America. Analyzing people's narratives along with texts like Emily Post's Etiquette and Martha Stewart's Entertaining, I suggest that domestic hospitality is a shifting social form, where an ethos of comfort and individuality often collides with more formal cultural templates of sociable meals. Among my interviewees, formal dinner parties remain important to upper middle class professionals, generally requiring invisible labor done by women, even when men cook. Others modify formality through buffets, asking guests to contribute to the meal, and using commercial foods. Potlucks are the most informal social form, with a potentially egalitarian division of labor and greater opportunities for diverse groups from different social strata to share food.

This dissertation investigates the organization and division of domestic labor(s) among and within lesbian and gay families. The research focuses upon the character and extent of feeding work, house work, kin work and consumption work within fifty-two lesbian and gay families (twenty-six male, twenty-six female). The study illuminates the influence of social class, occupation, gender, ethnicity/race and other factors upon the extent and character of housework. I limited participation to relationships of at least two years duration, in order to assess more established patterns. Methodologically, the study consists of in-depth interviews with 105 respondents and field observation of housework and other domestic practices in eight of the fifty-two families. To gather field data, I lived in residence with each of the eight families for one week each. In addition to addressing the distinctions that exist in patterns of domestic labor among lesbigay families, the research examines the place of such labor in the creation and maintenance of lesbigay family life, suggesting the centrality of domestic labor to the social production of family. I conclude with a discussion of the differentiated ability of lesbigay families to invest time and resources in domestic labor, and argue that affluent lesbigay families achieve a stronger sense of themselves as family because of their capacity to invest time, money, and energy into domesticity, in constrast to their less affluent peers.

The study of work and family has taken on increasing importance in corporate America. This has been attributed to the growing feminization of the workplace, the increasing numbers of dual-career families, and changing societal values. To date, most of the research concerning work and family issues has been from a conflict perspective. Such research is based on the assumption that work and family are mutually incompatible in some respect. This study broadened the scope of the conventional work/family research program through the use of the larger, more inclusive construct of work/family fit. Data were gathered from 265 respondents in order to develop a measure of work/family fit. The factor analysis of this measure indicated the following four factors: work interfering with family, work benefiting family, family interfering with work, and family benefiting work. While the first and third factors are already present in the work/family literature, the second and fourth factors represent a new addition to the study of the work/family relationship. This measure of work/family fit was then incorporated within an overall model and compared to a traditional model of work/family fit. LISREL results supported the use of the modified work/family model as being more robust and explanatory. Finally, the constructs of work/family fit and work/family conflict were compared concerning the predictive ability of each. Regression analysis indicated that work/family fit was the better predictor of turnover intentions, organizational citizenship behavior, organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and family satisfaction. Study limitations and future research are also discussed.