Acknowledgments

This volume distills highlights of a decade-long endeavor undertaken by the UCLA Sloan Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF). Beyond the editors and chapter authors the CELF project benefited vastly from our entire corps of researchers and technicians who worked closely together in collecting, archiving, and analyzing family life from dawn to dusk and beyond.1 All the researchers are indebted to Paul Connor, CELF Digital Laboratory director, who created a cutting edge technical infrastructure that was key to the success of CELF at every step of the way. His efforts culminated in the multimedia CELF Archive, an exceptionally rich documentation of middle-class America at the turn of the twenty-first century.

At the top of our list of acknowledgments are the thirty-two CELF families that graciously allowed us the extraordinary privilege of entering their homes and private lives. Over the years that the CELF team examined video recordings, photographs, timed observations, and other information gathered for each family, we developed a great affection and admiration for these parents and their children. It was simply breathtaking to log the nonstop activities that undergird households and the intricate coordination required for family members to accomplish them. Hats off to the CELF families!

We credit Kathleen Christensen, founder and director of the Workplace, Workforce, and Working Families Program at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, with the inspiration for the CELF project. The intellectual bedrock of our study is Kathleen's vision of dual-earner parents as faced with managing three jobs—two of which are paid employment plus the work of raising a family—and her mission to systematically document how parents actually live this challenge from one moment to the next. Throughout the CELF study Kathleen and the Sloan Foundation provided extraordinary support and shepherded our research so that it would be both scholarly and publicly relevant and accessible.

CELF also benefited from the community of scholars created by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as part of the Sloan Workplace, Workforce, and Working Families Program. In particular, through Sloan support two sister centers were established in Italy, iCELF, whose principal investigator (PI) is Clotilde Pontecorvo; and Sweden, sCELF, Karin Aronsson, PI. Our studies of middle-class American families were enhanced greatly by lively dialogue and collaboration with scholars across our three research sites. CELF has also had the luxury of working closely with Barbara Schneider, who codirected the Alfred P. Sloan Center on Parents, Children, and Work at the University of Chicago. Collaboration between our two centers on a documentary film and publications has demonstrated the power of integrating databases and methodologies to generate new ways of understanding the uneven interface of family and workplace.

Throughout the course of this project the CELF team relied on the exceptional talents of our administrative coordinators. Mary Hsieh was indispensable in the early years of the project. Thereafter, Johanna Romero and Adrian Meza independently and together were organizational geniuses who saw that family-researcher contacts, stipends, purchases, travel, budgets, reports, working papers, weekly meetings, colloquia, conferences, and other critical arrangements too numerous to specify were carried out with efficiency, grace, and taste. In the past two years, as CELF gathered its research findings to produce this edited volume and a photoessay book, Life at Home in the 21st Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors, we had the great fortune to have Aleksandra Van Loggerenberg as our chief editorial assistant. Aleks worked her magic on individual chapters to create a sense of coherence across the volume.

The specific CELF studies presented here greatly benefited from the valuable and sustained assistance of researchers Tatyana Plaksina and Julie Bernard. Maggie McKinley brought her anthropological sensibilities and media skills to create an impressive video documentary on working families. Satomi Kuroshima ran like clockwork the CELF Digital Laboratory, where 145 undergraduate students transcribed and coded all the data that compose the CELF Archive. We are also grateful to Anna Corwin and Keziah Conrad, whose watchful eyes and deep knowledge of the subject matter has guided the final editing of this volume. We also wish to express gratitude to UCLA for providing the ideal habitat for CELF activities, granting each Sloan-supported graduate student a Dissertation Year Fellowship, and maintaining the CELF Archive beyond our funding period for years to come.

Finally, we wish to thank our own partners and children for holding down our respective households while we spent long days recruiting, visiting, recording, tracking, and interviewing the families in the study. CELF researchers have learned a great deal about the efforts required to create resilient, loving families, which we hope will nourish our own homes and those of our readers.

NOTES

1. CELF was administered by Elinor Ochs, Center Director; Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, Director of Research; Paul Connor, Digital Laboratory Director; and our administrators, Adrian C. Meza, Johanna Romero, Mary Hsieh, and Aleksandra Van Loggerenberg. CELF Core Faculty were Jeanne Arnold, Thomas Bradbury, Linda Garro, Charles Goodwin, Marjorie H. Goodwin, Kris Gutiérrez, and Rena Repetti. CELF Postdoctoral Fellows included Margaret Beck, Belinda Campos, Jeffrey Good, Anthony P. Graesch, Carolina Izquierdo, Wendy Klein, Chi-Young Koh, April Leininger, Alesia Montgomery, and Amy Paugh. CELF Graduate Student Fellows were Mara Buchbinder, Leah Dickinson, Rachel George, Jeffrey Good, Anthony P. Graesch, Wendy Klein, Tali Klima, Heather Loyd, Angie Mittman, Angela Orlando, Diane Pash, Darby Saxbe, Merav Shohet, Karen Sirota, Jaqueline Sperling, Eve Tulbert, Shu-wen Wang, Heather Willihnganz Huffman, and Leah Wingard.