Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

The Political Consciousness of Post-Industrialism@@@The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics.

Lunds Civila Ryttarforening, LCR, is one of Sweden’s largest equestrian clubs with its facilities located in between Norra Faladen to the north and LTH to the south. To the west of the horse facilities is “Smorlyckans Idrottsplats” with football pitches, tennis courts, a Jujutsu club and a Home Guard’s building. The club has approximately 500 weekly riders and offers a wide range of activities within the the riding school, as well as stalls for private horses. Discussions on whether the equestrian centre should be relocated or not have reached a standstill as it has been going on for about 50 years. I believe that if LCR is to stay on its current site it can not continue to be an island. Therefore this project is an investigation into how the centre could be developed meeting and integrating with its surroundings. As much as the horse is the centre of the stable and the equestrian sport it’s also the centre of this project. “When Species Meet” is a what-if scenario on what could happen if we plan for the horse and who else that could benefit from that. In addition to the architectural proposal, one major question with the project has been to develop my own method and investigate how it’s possible to keep a high rate of complexity when working with a project. This is something I have done by taking the position of the horse instead of the architect. This change of position has provided me with a possibility to see the site, with all its opportunities, from a perspective that I couldn’t have without the horse. Therefore, this project is also a try on how it could be possible to take on other projects by relocating my investigation to several other positions relevant for those projects. (Less)

When Species Meet

Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World.

Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World

This keynote chapter presents main research findings on new gender roles and their implications for families and societies. It first depicts the development of family forms in Europe over the past fifty years, with a focus on increasingly diverse family biographies and the changes in the roles of women and men. It highlights that changes in women’s role have been more comprehensive, whereas in most countries the transformation of the male role has barely started. Next, views in contemporary scholarship on the interplay between the increasing family complexity and gender role changes are addressed. A detailed discussion of new challenges of transitions in and organization of family life follows, with a focus on four main topics: women’s new role and the implications for family dynamics, the gendered transition to parenthood, new gender roles in doing families, and coping strategies in family and work reconciliation under conditions of uncertainty and precariousness and impacts on fertility. A brief conclusion ends this chapter.

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The New Roles of Men and Women and Implications for Families and Societies

Men in the transition to parenthood have to integrate fatherhood into their self-concepts and identities. Contemporary societies, in particular, provide two contradictory discourses for fathersto-b...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/41604478

When Men Become Fathers: Men’s Identity at the Transition to Parenthood

We elaborate on an aspect of photo interviews with children that has so far not been considered sufficiently: Photographs may encourage children to talk about sensitive aspects of family life. The potential and limitations of this aspect are discussed along the lines of visibility and invisibility. Visualisations support children in verbalising their thoughts, but also stimulate narrations on issues that are not displayed. Data are drawn from interviews with fifty 10-year-old children who took photographs in their families, and their parents (n = 71). We conclude that visual methods and their combination with a multiple perspectives approach may generate substantial benefits in childhood and family research. © 2012 The Author(s). Children & Society © 2012 National Children’s Bureau and Blackwell Publishing Limited.

My Family through the Lens. Photo Interviews with Children and Sensitive Aspects of Family Life

As the articles in this special issue attest, the scholarly study of fathers has become a global phenomenon. The articles are based on just a few of the papers dealing with fathers presented at the International Sociological Association’s XVII World Congress of Sociology held in Durban, South Africa in 2006. The papers presented by authors from around the globe were part of sessions organized by the ISA’s Committee on Family Research. The articles selected for publication focus on fathers caring for young children within the constraints men face when trying to meet diverse fatherhood expectations. Several articles address the role parental leave from paid work plays in fathering. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were utilized to study fathers, fathering, and fatherhood in South Africa, Belgium, Finland, Japan, Italy, Sweden, and France. Many comparisons are made with other nations, especially the United States.

International Research on Fathering: An Expanding Horizon

Ongoing global changes bring fundamentally new scientific problems requiring new concepts and tools. A key issue concerns a vast variety of practically irreducible uncertainties, which challenge our traditional models and require new concepts and analytical tools. The uncertainty critically dominates, e.g., the climate change debates. In short, the dilemma is concerned with enormous costs vs. massive uncertainties of potential extreme impacts. Traditional scientific approaches usually rely on real observations and experiments. Yet no sufficient observations exist for new problems, and "pure" experiments and learning by doing may be very expensive, dangerous, or simply impossible. In addition, available historical observations are contaminated by actions, policies. The complexity of new problems does not allow to achieve enough certainty by increasing the resolution of models or by bringing in more links. Hence, new tools for modeling and management of uncertainty are needed, as given in this book which was prepared for an interdisciplinary audience, and addresses open problems, limitations of known approaches, novel methods and techniques, or lessons from the applications of various approaches. Thus, the book contributes to a better understanding between practitioners dealing with the management of uncertainty, and scientists working on either corresponding modeling approaches that can be applied for improving understanding or management of uncertainty.

Rudolf Richter

Papers

The New Roles of Men and Women and Implications for Families and Societies

When Men Become Fathers: Men’s Identity at the Transition to Parenthood

My Family through the Lens. Photo Interviews with Children and Sensitive Aspects of Family Life

International Research on Fathering: An Expanding Horizon

The new generations of Europeans : demography and families in the enlarged European Union