College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Growing Uncertainty in Marriage Expectations among U.S. Youth(Socius, 2024-03-26) Cohen, Philip N.; Pepin, Joanna R.Marriage rates are falling in the United States. The authors ask whether today's young adults are likely to continue this trend. Using Monitoring the Future Public-Use Cross-Sectional Datasets (1976-2022), this visualization presents U.S. 12th graders' marriage expectations. It shows declining optimism that they will be "very good" spouses and declining expectations that they will eventually marry. Both trends are prominent in the last 10 years of the survey, and both are more dramatic among young women than among young men. If these trends hold, it may foretell further declines in marriage rates in the coming years.Item Examination of Racial (In)variance in the Effect of Father Involvement on Delinquency among Urban Adolescents in the US(2022) Situ, Xinyi; Jacobsen, Wade; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Many prior studies have focused on how different types of paternal involvement contribute to adolescent delinquency. Yet, a relatively limited number of studies research the potential variations of paternal involvement’s influence on adolescent delinquency across different ethnic-racial groups. The present study explored whether various types of paternal involvement functioned similarly for white and racial minority adolescents, and whether paternal involvement had any racialized effect on adolescent delinquency. Using data from Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and Poisson regression models, the present study found limited evidence that various types of paternal involvement function differently for the same group. In addition, only certain kinds of paternal involvement showed differential impacts across racial groups. Limitations and implications for future research are also discussed.Item INEQUALITY AND THE HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY(2018) Pepin, Joanna; Sayer, Liana; Cohen, Philip; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Intrahousehold finances offer a window into the crossroads between the market domain’s emphasis on self-reliance and the family domain’s emphasis on interdependence. Modern couples confront tensions between ideals of mutual family interests and values of individualism, a departure from fitting themselves into culturally expected family arrangements of the past. How these social changes impact progress towards gender equality is not well understood. The dissertation aims are to: (1) identify mechanisms associated with different types of money arrangements in families, and (2) examine the association between financial arrangements and gender inequality in families. To meet these aims, I used data from two sources. First, I used multinomial modeling of 2012 International Social Survey Programme data to show cohabiting couples in countries with greater gender equality partially integrated their money instead of keeping it separate. Married couples pooled money regardless of country-level gender equality. Findings suggest that different cultural logics operate in married and cohabiting partnerships across gendered contexts, rather than cohabitation functioning as a weaker form of marriage. Second, I devised a novel survey experiment to collect the first nationally representative sample of U.S. adults’ attitudes about income sharing in families. Results challenge the notion that marriage distinctively encourages support for financial integration in families. Findings also revealed that respondents believed higher-earning partners ought to hold back a greater absolute value of their earnings for personal use, allowing inequality in labor market rewards to perpetuate unequal conditions within families. I also used this data to disentangle the mechanisms associated with perceptions of decision-making authority. Findings indicated higher relative-earners within families were not regarded as entitled to the final word in decisions. Whether respondents considered earnings individually or community owned did not explain the lack of association between relative earnings and decision-making clout. Instead, findings showed a significant association between the fictional decider’s gender and respondents’ perceptions of fairness. Specifically, when women were presented as the decider over monetary family choices, unilateral decision making about monetary items was viewed more favorably. Collectively, these findings suggest gender socialization theories are essential to explaining persistent gender inequality in families.Item House or Home: Nuclear Family Construction and Federal Housing Policy Development(2010) Fritz, Marie Justine; Alford, Fred; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The federal government's complicity in racial discrimination in the development and administration of housing policy has been well documented, but the government's role in reproducing gendered federal housing policies in the United States has been largely unrecognized in the political science literature. I argue that United States housing policy in the twentieth century is inextricably linked to perceptions of gender and the single family home, and the traditional nuclear family has been rendered a hegemonic entity. The politics of housing cannot be understood without an analysis of the effects that conceptions of gender have had on housing policy and in turn of the effects of such policy on the cultural and social norms surrounding gender. Contemporary household regulation is the culmination of a gradual process of state-building during which the state came to define and regulate the nuclear, heterosexual family. Nuclear family hegemony began during the interwar period and was institutionalized under the New Deal, became naturalized from the 1950s to the 1970s through suburbanization and urban disinvestment, and developed into policymaking that was increasingly punitive in the 1990s for those outside the nuclear- and nuptial-family norm. The system of separate benefits for nuclear families and non-traditional households that was established decades earlier made public and subsidized housing ripe for attack in a growing culturally conservative atmosphere. The HOPE VI program and the decision in HUD v. Rucker represent various ways in which the government implicated family in its attempts to regulate the homes of low-income, non-traditional households that are often headed by minority single and elderly women. Although current housing policies reflect changed policy commitments from multiple administrations, present access to housing remains family-composition specific. Nuclear family hegemony serves to reify distinctions based on sex; it incorporated women's economic dependence as an essential component of housing finance and endorsed a single standard for what a good family looked like. In drawing boundaries around citizenship through federal housing policy, the state helped to define the very meaning of family in America.Item THE INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF GENDER-ROLE ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR: HOW DO PARENTS MATTER?(2008-07-30) Wight, Vanessa Rachel; Bianchi, Suzanne M; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines the dynamic relationship between a parent's gender-role attitudes and behavior and their children's subsequent gender-role attitudes and housework behavior as adults. It uses a national sample of 1,864 young adults aged 18-32 in 2001-2002 (Wave 3), whose parents were previously interviewed in 1987-1988 (Wave 1) and 1992-1994 (Wave 2) as part of the National Surveys of Families and Households (NSFH). Overall, the findings suggest that attitudes remain stable across generations--particularly from mothers to children. Consistent with earlier research, mothers who express egalitarian attitudes about women's and men's gender roles have children who are more egalitarian on average than those with mothers who express more conventional views of women and men. Furthermore, when measures of mother's gendered ideology and housework are considered simultaneously, a mother's gender ideology is a strong predictor of both her daughter's and son's gender ideology, and this relationship holds whether or not a mother's housework behavior is consistent with her ideas. Early maternal attitudes observed when focal children were aged 2-11 (Wave 1) are significant predictors of both daughters' and sons' gender attitudes in adulthood. Results from analyses of change over time in a mother's gendered attitudes and behaviors indicate that what is modeled early in a child's life, more than its consistency, is an important predictor of a child's subsequent gender-role attitudes as an adult. When fathers are added to the analysis and the role of mother-father agreement in gender ideology is considered, the results indicate that daughters with a mother and father who both hold egalitarian views of women's and men's roles are themselves more egalitarian than daughters with parents who are both traditional. On the other hand, a son's gender ideology shows less association with mother-father gender ideology agreement. As long as one parent holds more egalitarian attitudes, a son's gender ideology is more egalitarian than sons with parents who are both traditional. The transmission of gendered behaviors from parents to children, however, appears to be less stable and more complex than the transmission of attitudes. For example, the amount of time daughters spend on housework is primarily associated with their own adult characteristics. Most notably, taking on adult family roles (such as a spouse, partner, or parent) is associated with more time women spend in housework. Yet there is some evidence that later maternal housework time (observed at Wave 2 when children were aged 10-17) is positively associated with a daughter's adult housework time, regardless of whether Wave 1 housework time was high or low. Among sons, the results suggest that the more housework a mother does in Waves 1 and 2, the more a son does in adulthood, and this relationship does not appear to be sensitive to the mother's housework time and consistency in Waves 1 and 2. Finally, the timing of exposure to a mother's attitudes seems to be more salient to a partnered daughter's share of the couple's combined housework than whether the mother's attitudes remain consistent over time. Overall, this dissertation finds that our understanding of gendered outcomes in adulthood is best understood by applying a life course perspective that acknowledges the contributions of both parental effects and children's own current circumstances-- recognizing that adult lives evolve over time, are intertwined within an ever changing society, and cannot be understood from a single survey or snapshot in time.Item Planning for Career and Family: An Instrument Development Study(2008-04-10) Ganginis, Heather Victoria; O'Brien, Karen; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of the present study was to develop a scale to measure the extent to which people take into consideration future children and romantic relationships when deciding on a career (i.e. The Planning for Career and Family Scale) and to assess the psychometric properties of this instrument. Participants included 325 women. Data suggested that two subscales comprise the measure, the Incorporating Future Family Scale and the Choosing a Career Independent of Family Scale. Internal consistency estimates of subscales ranged from .78 to .83. Convergent and discriminant validity was supported for the Incorporating Future Family in Career Plans subscale and the Choosing a Career Independent of Future Family subscale. Test-retest reliability estimates were adequate, suggesting stability regarding the measurement of these constructs. Directions for future research and the limitations of this study are discussed.Item The Outsourcing of Intimate Affairs(2007-04-26) Lair, Craig Dennis; Ritzer, George; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I place the trend of outsourcing what I refer to as "intimate affairs" - those activities necessary to reproduce both physically and emotionally what Habermas (1991 [1962]: 46-47) calls the "intimate sphere" (e.g. the preparation of food, housekeeping tasks, parenting, gift giving, etc.) - within a theoretical context by arguing that this type of outsourcing is best understood from the perspective of reflexive modernization theory. In particular, I argue that the outsourcing of intimate affairs is best seen as resulting from two processes that stand at the heart of reflexive modernization: the disembedding of the social world and the concomitant wave of individualization that has accompanied this development. But more than just reflecting these processes, I also argue that intimate outsourcing can be seen as promoting disembedding and individualization as well. However, this dissertation also addresses a number of issues that, while being central to the debate over this topic, have largely been left unanswered. These include questions of what exactly is outsourcing and how it can be applied to activities such as intimate affairs? It is also includes the question of what is new and/or historically unique about outsourcing in comparison to past practices where intimate affairs were outsourcing. As I show, answering these questions is important for placing this trend in a theoretical context. In this dissertation I also critically evaluate a number of alternative theoretical accounts that have addressed to topic of outsourcing at the micro-level. As I show, while many of these theories have important insights in to this topic, they also have a number of significant limitations in accounting for the outsourcing of intimate affairs. In particular, I argue that most of these theories fail to place this type of outsourcing within a broad enough theoretical context. I show that such a context is offered by the theory of reflexive modernization theory and that many of the particular insights of these alternative theories can be integrated into the reflexive modernization perspective.