Paid Work, Parenting, and Housework: Gender Strategies and Myths@@@The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home.

Determinants of salivary α-amylase in humans and methodological considerations

This is a very large compilation of growth data with an extremely wide coverage of population groups, many of which will be completely unknown to all but the professional ethnographer. There is, however, a disappointingly narrow coverage of variables (length, weight, body widths, circumferences and proportions, skinfold thicknesses, and maturity). Many of the findings are relevant to an important question: should one set of growth reference data be used throughout the world, thus allowing ready comparability between groups, or should there be separate sets for each major racial group or even a multitude of local sets? The studies summarized in this volume indicate many population groups have similar potentials for growth in major body dimensions. For example, the narrower range of means among European than among African groups that range from "tribal" to well-off indicates the range of variation in growth would be reduced greatly if the environmental circumstances allowed

Worldwide Variation in Human Growth

Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. Bradd Shore. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 428 pp.

Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning

Competing Devotions: Career and Family Among Women Executives. Mary Blair-Loy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2003. 269 pp. ISBN 0-674-01089-2. $39.95 (cloth). Despite the rapid increase in women's educational attainment and enhanced labor force opportunities, women continue to lag behind men in career success. Goldin (2004) estimates that only 21%-27% of recent cohorts of college-educated women achieve "work and family" success (babies and well-paid careers) by midlife; Mary Blair-Loy, in Competing Devotions, helps us understand why. Based on in-depth interviews with 56 women in top executive positions in the finance industry and with 25 women who left these high-powered careers to focus on children and family, she illuminates the factors that impede gender equality in the labor market and the home even among those with the greatest resources and ability. According to Blair-Loy, two powerful schema help define the options of high-achieving women: the schema of "devotion to work" and "devotion to family." Schema operate at both the social and individual level: They are powerful not only because they offer shared understanding about how the world works and how it should work but also because they become internalized by the individual. The dilemma for high-achieving women is that they are caught between the widely shared belief that their profession is a calling, but so is motherhood. Under the devotion to work schema, market work is more than a job, it is a vocation. Work in these high-powered finance jobs requires single-minded devotion. In its extreme, only those who devote themselves totally to the job are worthy of the rise to the top. On the other hand, an equally powerful devotion to family schema sees motherhood in much the same light, as a life's work to which a woman must give herself over. One cannot be a "good mother" part time, and it is assumed that biology makes women, not men, the best caregivers of children. Because time is finite, it is difficult-indeed impossible for the most zealous adherents of both-to combine work and family. Fully two thirds of the 56 women in Blair-Loy's sample of top finance executives do not have children. Blair-Loy sees these women as conformists; they do not challenge the devotion to work schema by trying to combine highpowered careers with childrearing. Instead, they forego becoming mothers. On the other side, the women who have completely given up careers to rear children also do not challenge either schema but rather reinforce the notion that occupational achievement and good mothering are incompatible. Interestingly, views of what children need differ for those who devote themselves to family versus those who continue in high-powered careers while also rearing children. …

Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives

Salivary α-amylase recently has been identified as a stress-related biomarker for autonomic nervous system activity. This study addresses sample collection and handling considerations for field researchers. Saliva was collected by unstimulated passive drool from 14 adults and pooled. Incubation of pooled saliva at 22 or 37°C for 21 days did not diminish amylase activity. However, sodium azide added at concentrations ≤1.12 mg/ml to pooled saliva artificially inflated activity. After dosing cotton rolls within Salivette saliva collection devices with 0.25 to 1.5 ml of unpooled passive drool saliva from six additional adults, recovery of amylase activity was significantly below 100% at all volumes, with increased variance in recovery when the cotton was incompletely saturated (≤1.0 ml). Hence, collection by passive drool instead of cotton-containing devices for amylase determinations is recommended, particularly whenever it is impossible to ensure full, uniform cotton saturation, and azide should be avoided as a preservative. Am. J. Hum. Biol., 2008. © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Methodological considerations in the use of salivary α-amylase as a stress marker in field research

Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes among Mexican Immigrant Women. By Emily Mendenhall. 145 pp. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. 2012. $94.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper or e‐book).

The signs of stress: embodiments of biosocial stress among type 2 diabetic women in New Delhi, India.

This study examines everyday family life as a social regulator of child adrenocortical activity during the normative challenge of return to school. If positive family function facilitates child adaptation, we expected that mother-child relationships following school entry would predict individual differences in evening cortisol, a context-sensitive marker for the response to concurrent demands. Among 28 children followed longitudinally, late in pre-kindergarten those living with single and/or employed mothers had higher evening cortisol. Yet early during the following school year, children with poorer mother-child relationships had higher evening cortisol. Cortisol awakening response, a comparatively stable marker of anticipated demands, was higher with maternal employment, single parents, and busier child schedules before school re-entry, and with maternal employment afterwards. We argue for a layered ecological approach to social regulation, recognizing that family structure, family functioning, and proximal features of everyday life within the family moderate child adrenocortical activity differently across contexts.

http://anthropology.emory.edu/home/documents/worthman-lab/2008_Return%20to%20school.pdf

Return to school accompanied by changing associations between family ecology and cortisol.

This study tested associations among parenting stress prior to a child’s kindergarten entry, the sustainability of family routines, and biomarkers of stress among parents following the kindergarten transition. Parents (N = 51) with higher prekindergarten scores on the Parenting Stress Index Short Form reported lower Family Routines Inventory scores following school entry relative to their baseline. Declining family routines, in turn, were associated following kindergarten entry with greater 5-day mean and variance in evening cortisol, and higher C-reactive protein, an inflammatory mediator. However, only the cortisol findings remained significant controlling for baseline physiology. These findings support a family systems, social-ecological approach to life course development, wherein even mild challenges posed by children’s normative transitions may reveal differences in parents’ biobehavioral functioning.

http://anthropology.emory.edu/home/documents/worthman-lab/journal_articles_2/2011DeCaroFamilyRoutines.pdf

Jason A. DeCaro

Papers

Methodological considerations in the use of salivary α-amylase as a stress marker in field research

Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes among Mexican Immigrant Women. By Emily Mendenhall. 145 pp. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. 2012. $94.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper or e‐book).

The signs of stress: embodiments of biosocial stress among type 2 diabetic women in New Delhi, India.

Return to school accompanied by changing associations between family ecology and cortisol.

Changing family routines at kindergarten entry predict biomarkers of parental stress