By Trucmai Nguyen
Daily Bruin Contributor
The middle-class, dual-income family will be the focus of the
new UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, funded by a $3.6
million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
CELF, which will house data collected from 30 families over a
three-year period, seeks to document how daily household activities
keep a middle-class, dual-income family thriving and growing, said
Tami Kremer-Sadlik, director of research for the new center.
According to Kremer-Sadlik, researchers from disciplines in
anthropology, psychology, linguistics and education will be at the
core of the center’s development.
“We want to capture a rich enough record so that people
from many different disciplines can garner profound meaning from
the material and do so for many generations to come,” Elinor
Ochs, an anthropology and applied linguistics professor and leader
of the center’s nine-member team, said in a statement.
The project is awaiting approval from the university’s
Office for Protection of Research Subjects, but the team plans to
begin recruiting families this fall.
To be eligible for the study, families must be comprised of two
or three children, with one between eight and 10 years of age. The
family must own its own home, and both parents must work at least
30 hours per week outside the house.
Because of existing debates among social scientists over
criteria used to classify the middle class, the CELF team has
agreed to allow families to determine their own status. The
families may base the status on educational, financial or
geographical background.
Researchers will analyze consequences of the shift in division
of labor within the home over the past 50 years, as more women
entered the workforce and families balanced work with home life,
Kremer-Sadlik said.
The research will entail filming the daily activities of
families in West Los Angeles, an area which includes Palms, Culver
City and Santa Monica.
Researchers plan to fill 1,080 digital cassettes and 3,000
CD-ROMs with 800 hours of what they call “the drama of the
working family.”
Points of interest for research include health, education,
language, marital relations, child development and the utilization
of space to bring together or keep apart people, Kremer-Sadlik
said.
Although the tendency of individuals to act unnaturally in front
of a video camera may distort data, Kremer-Sadlik said people
quickly become comfortable.
“The relationship (among family members) is still
there,” she said. “People do not reinvent new
relationships with each other.”
The project is a vision of the Sloan Foundation, a non-profit
organization based in New York, which sponsors six university
centers across the nation dedicated to similar research.
The center, based in Haines Hall, will be open to faculty
members, graduate students and other authorized personnel after the
data is collected. Restriction to the center ensures
confidentiality of the families that volunteer for the research,
Kremer-Sadlik said.