APPENDIX

The CELF Study

Private life in the United States and elsewhere is idealized as out of the public eye, concealed, protected, and relatively sacred. We have laws and rules of decorum that draw boundaries between public and private worlds. Public life implicates conducting oneself as expected for an audience, while in private life people feel that they can be less conventional and freer to be more one's self.1 Goffman notes that the contemporary middle-class home is often conceived of as a “backstage” region where family members feel that they do not have to perform for others, although certain areas of the house, like the bedroom and bathroom, are more backstage than others.2

Social scientists have long thought that the public-private distinction is highly cultural and that private realms are as socially orchestrated as public ones. Yet social scientists have been relatively reticent to actually cross over the public-private threshold, directly enter into, and observe intimate life-worlds. This reticence is particularly apparent in the case of making visible the private worlds of middle-class American families. Entering these middle-class homes, where privacy is conceived of as a cultural entitlement of the highest sort, is a fearsome challenge. Moreover, in 2001 when we began our study, we had to overcome parents’ trepidation that their private lives could become someone else's reality show or circulated on the Internet. Given these sociohistorical conditions, CELF researchers treaded carefully and gratefully. And in the end we have amassed an extraordinarily rare and rich archive of the backstage realms of twenty-first-century middle-class households that are otherwise out of bounds. The CELF photographic archive displays rooms as they are lived in and possessions as they are used and casually placed. We can read these photographs for what they reveal about the meaning of home and middle-class informality and intimacy. The corpus of video recordings represents sometimes self-conscious but mostly habitual ways in which family members engaged one another as they moved through their day.

Researchers trying to fathom how contemporary working parents strive to raise a family dream that they can be a fly on the wall observing the countless tasks, activities, concerns, and accomplishments that consume families’ waking hours. CELF cannot claim fly status, given that we entered homes with cameras and handheld tracking devices, sampled stress hormones, interviewed family members at length, and asked them to complete psychological measures, yet we came relatively close to assuming this vantage point. The CELF team was not invisible, but researchers who entered the homes of families gracious enough to open their doors were ethnographers trained to be participant observers, that is, to be attuned to the activities and sensibilities of persons around them, to sometimes withdraw into the woodwork or outside, to sometimes lend a helping hand, and to sometimes be sounding boards for someone wanting to be heard.

THE CELF FAMILIES

The thirty-two families that participated in the CELF study were recruited through school flyers and newspaper ads and by word of mouth. Families that contacted CELF were screened by telephone to ensure that they met criteria for inclusion in the study. Families that made the decision to join the study signed consent forms. These described the study procedures and the different ways in which CELF researchers would be using the data collected. The forms also specified that families could withdraw from the study at any time with no penalty. Each family received a payment as a token of our appreciation for having participated in our study.

All participating families were composed of two parents and two to three children, one of whom was seven to twelve years old. Both parents worked at least thirty hours outside the home. In addition, the families owned and paid a mortgage on a home. In total, the CELF corpus comprised 64 adults and 73 children. The children included 35 girls and 38 boys, aged from one to seventeen. The age of CELF mothers ranged from thirty-two to fifty (mean 40) and fathers, from thirty-two to fifty-eight (mean 42).

Thirty households were headed by heterosexual parents (mother and father), and two were headed by same-sex parents (two fathers). As awhole the ethnic composition of the CELF families represents the spectrum of ethnicities in the greater Los Angeles area.

Figure A.1. CELF parents’ self-identified ethnicity.

Some CELF parents self-identified generically as “White,” “Hispanic,” “Black,” “Asian American,” or simply “American.” Other parents self-identified more specifically by country of origin (e.g., “German, Canadian,” “Yugoslavian Bosnian,” “Indian") or religion (e.g., “Jewish,” “Protestant,” “Hindu") or both (e.g., “Russian, Jewish"). (See Figure A.1.)

Some families were multiethnic, each parent bringing a different background into the household. For example, in the Tracy family, the mother self-identified as Afro-Cuban and the father as “Euro Caucasian.”

The CELF families resided in the greater Los Angeles area—from the San Fernando Valley to Torrance on the north-south axis and from Los Feliz to Santa Monica running east to west (Map A.1). All the families can be characterized within the loosely bounded socioeconomic category of the American middle class. It has long been argued that some combination of income, equity, education, occupation, and lifestyle distinguishes one's position in the class hierarchy.3 In the United States the middle class occupies a broad swath that includes upper- and lower-middle-class persons. The noted anthropologist Sherry Ortner depicts the middle class as “the most inclusive social category; indeed, it is almost a national category. In many usages it means simply all those Americans who have signed up for the American dream. . . . It is everybody except the very rich and the very poor.”4

Map A.1. Distribution of CELF families in the Los Angeles area.

The majority of CELF parents were well educated, 37 percent having earned a bachelor degree and 30 percent a graduate degree. Parents’ occupations were quite varied and included lawyer, dentist, engineer, accountant, teacher, business owner, sales executive, librarian, nurse, technician, office clerk, pilot, fireman, and sheriff, among other lines of work. Most parents (53 percent of fathers, 43 percent of mothers) worked 40 to 49 hours a week, some worked over 50 hours (29 percent of fathers, 10 percent of mothers), and some between 30 and 40 hours (12 percent of fathers, 26 percent of mothers). The median family income was $115,000, way above the median in the Los Angeles area at the time, which stood at $43,518 (Figure A.2). As noted above, each family owned its home, paying a monthly mortgage. Most homes were modestly sized, but some were quite expansive, with big backyards.

Figure A.2. CELF household income.

THE CELF TEAM

The CELF team drew on expertise from academia and multimedia technology. Researchers came together from the disciplines of anthropology (including archaeology and medical and linguistic anthropology), applied linguistics, education, psychology (including clinical and social psychology), and sociology.5 Although this volume focuses on the lives of Los Angeles families, the CELF project team collaborated closely with European colleagues who established parallel projects in Sweden (sCELF) and Italy (iCELF),6 also funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. As seen in chapters 7 and 11, these cross-cultural collaborations offer rich, multifaceted understandings of commonalties and divergences in family ideologies and practices, in the context of historically rooted and shifting sociocultural and economic conditions in the United States and Europe.

What makes CELF rather unusual is that faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate and undergraduate students worked closely with multimedia specialists to conduct a single cross-disciplinary and multimedia study of family life. Researchers spent a year designing the study in such a way that we could benefit from existing methods from our respective fields and introduce novel interdisciplinary methods and media advances to unravel the dynamics of raising a family in the twenty-first century. We then built a CELF digital laboratory to develop research-relevant software and manage the video and audio footage, photographs, architectural blueprints, clinical measurements, and other data that we collected. We also created a second CELF laboratory to view, analyze, and present data. From 2001 to 2010 the CELF research team met at least once a week to guide data collection, monitor data management, and discuss analyses. At the same time, researchers on specific projects collaborated continuously to code data and develop insights.

THE CELF ENDEAVOR

The CELF project began in 2001 and closed its doors in 2010. Data collection itself—that is, actually entering family households—took place between the years 2002 and 2005. We turn now to the overall scope of the CELF research effort. CELF designed new methodologies and adapted existing research tools to apprehend family moments that matter, perspectives that transcend these moments, and the toll of everyday challenges on family members and relationships.

“A Week in the Life”

At the heart of the CELF study is the documentation of one week in the life of thirty-two families. Three kinds of documentation captured these family life-worlds: (1) video recording, (2) scan sampling, and (3) Cortisol collection and daily mood and event reports.

Video recording

CELF researchers used two prosumer digital video cameras to record family life on two weekdays, Saturday morning, and Sunday morning and evening (Figure A.3). On weekdays family members were recorded from the time they woke up until they left for school and work in the mornings and then again when they reunited later in the day through the time when the children went to bed at night. The cameras focused on working parents interacting with their children and partners but captured children's interactions with siblings and friends as well. Using cameras with a wide-angle lens to capture the expanse of family activity and two microphones (a camera-mounted microphone and a wireless lavaliere microphone) to capture sound in the hustle and bustle of daily life, videographers filmed family members in and outside the home—accompanying them in cars, during extracurricular activities, at restaurants, on errands, peace marches, medical visits, and elsewhere. The videographers were trained to be participant observers and attuned to social situations and members’ sensibilities. Wireless microphones allowed recordings to be made at a distance, reducing the intrusiveness of the cameras. Approximately fifty hours of video were recorded for each family.

Figure A.3. Video recording family life.

Scan sampling

Borrowing a tool from behavioral psychology and ethological studies, CELF researchers tracked family members at timed intervals while they were at home. Every ten minutes across all four days of filming, each family member's location, focal activities, and objects used in activities inside the house and in the surrounding yard space were recorded using a handheld computer. Trackers were trained to remain on the periphery of home spaces and out of the way of family members. Scan sampling within this confined space allowed researchers to capture the behaviors of all family members at the same moment in time (Figure A.4). This method systematically documents family members’ use of spaces in the home, the type of activities that take place, and the objects that are used at any given time. As such this method provides a snapshot of family life that complements what is captured by the field of view of the video camera lens. Approximately 530 tracking observations were made in each family.

Figure A.4. Scan sampling captures family members’ locations and activities: here black circles represent one parent and a child reading in bedroom, one parent in kitchen, and a child in bathroom.

Cortisol sampling and mood and daily event reports

On three weekdays (the two weekdays of video recording plus one additional weekday), both parents and all children above the age of eight provided saliva samples to measure the levels of cortisol, a hormone that marks stress, at four times during the day: (1) early morning, just after awakening; (2) late morning, just before lunch; (3) afternoon, just before leaving work or school; and (4) evening, before bedtime. Saliva samples were frozen and shipped for analysis to an off-campus facility. At each sampling point in the day, these family members filled out a form rating their mood in relation to a list of twenty-five adjectives that describe positive, negative, and depressed moods. In addition, at two points in the day (just before lunch and just before leaving work or school) the parents completed a rating scale of their workload and social interactions at work, and children completed a rating scale of positive and negative academic and social events experienced at school.

Figure A.5. Architectural floor plan of home.

Prior to “A Week in the Life”

Before this documentation of a week in the life of thirty-two families, CELF researchers gathered important information about family members and their home, which provided a rich sociocultural, psychological, and personal backdrop to the stream of household activity that we captured over the course of the week. Parents filled out questionnaires about family background, childcare arrangements, financial resources, social networks, and daily schedules. Parents were then interviewed regarding their perspectives on educational practices, social support, and family routines. These interviews were audio recorded. Family members were also asked to complete standard measures of personality (NEO Personality Inventory) and of the effects of stressful life events (Life Events Inventory).

In addition, considerable information was gathered about the family home:

(1) Parents provided a history of when the home was built, when it was purchased, and when and how it was remodeled in any way.

(2) Each space in the house was measured, and an architectural map was drawn for each home, which noted locations of major objects such as furniture (Figure A.5). This map was later used to identify spaces when researchers tracked family members’ locations during the week of observations.

(3) Over five hundred photographs were taken of spaces and objects for each family in the study, including 360-degree panoramas of each room. Among other uses, these photographs allowed CELF archaeologists to identify, categorize, and count the mountains of possessions visible in each room of the house.

(4) Each parent and child above the age of five conducted an individual video tour of their home. Researchers left a video camera with each family and asked that each family member walk through the home and yard, filming and talking about home spaces and the objects therein. The recorded home tours gave researchers access to how each adult and child viewed the “same” locations and objects from different vantage points. Moreover, in the course of conducting the home tours, family members revealed a range of positive and negative emotions and moral sentiments about what they saw, providing crucial perspectives on the material habitat of middle-class families at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

After “A Week in the Life”

After documenting a week in the life of each family, CELF researchers returned to the family for an additional visit. The purpose of this visit was primarily to garner greater insight into how parents and children view themselves individually and as a family. Among other rewards, the return visit opened a window into family members’ hopes, expectations, and realities in achieving emotional and physical well-being.

The focus of meeting the parents was to elicit their reflections on family and health. An in-depth interview with parents was video recorded and involved two parts:

1) Both parents discussed in depth (for approximately two hours) how health concerns affect their family life, including their assessments of each family member's overall health, chronic medical conditions, and recent health-related events. The researcher also asked parents to talk about what it means to achieve well-being and to be a healthy person, what it takes to stay healthy, and health habits in their own family.

2) While a camera was rolling, one or both parents opened their refrigerators, cupboards, pantries, and medicine cabinets and talked about the inventory of their contents, including rationales for certain purchases and which members of the family consume which items. These descriptions of stockpiled food, medicine, vitamins, and other health-related items stored in the house illuminated shopping and meal preparation practices, food categories, and cultural understandings of nutrition, cuisine/ and the path to health and well-being.

During this visit a CELF researcher interviewed each child about his or her family routines, responsibilities, and social relationships; what it is like living with working parents; and thoughts about what he or she might do later in life. In addition, the researcher asked each child eight years of age or older to complete a psychological measure of self-esteem (in academic, athletic, social, and other domains) and perception of social support from family, friends, and teachers (Harter Self-Perception Scales).

Finally, researchers left additional psychological measures for each adult family member to complete (CES-Depression Inventory, Marital Adjustment Test, and Life Events Inventory [focused on marriage]). These assessments of psychological well-being and the quality of the couple relationship were relevant to interpreting couple's interactions, the emotional tone of their communication, and levels of stress documented across the week of video recordings.

POSTPRODUCTION

Several post-data collection efforts ensured that the data corpus was organized and accessible to CELF researchers.

Video/Audio Postproduction

Research assistants created an activity log of each video recording of family interaction, using a set of key terms to mark important family moments (e.g. homework, housework, job-related work, recreation, errands). All video recordings of family interaction, home tours, and interviews were then transcribed using vPrism software, which allows researchers to synchronize video images and transcription (Figure A.6). The customized vPrism software program was developed to allow researchers to code frame by frame directly on the video the frequency and duration of key features of the recorded data (e.g., presence of family member, location, activity, time). All codes are Boolean searchable, thus sub-corpora can be generated rapidly based on various criteria (e.g., use of screen media, multitasking, couples together, siblings together).

Figure A.6. vPrism synchronization of video and transcript.

Digital Image Postproduction

All photographs were marked for image content (e.g., family member, home space, food, toys, school objects) and entered into a searchable image database (Figure A.7).

Questionnaire Postproduction

All questionnaires were scanned and responses entered into a searchable database. Psychological measures were scored and entered into the database.

THE CELF ARCHIVE

In its entirety the UCLA Sloan CELF project has yielded an extraordinary archive of information regarding the state of American middle-class working parents and their children at the start of the twenty-first century. The CELF Archive is stored at the University of California, Los Angeles, and serves as a historically significant resource. The CELF Archive includes raw as well as digitized, coded, and transcribed data to facilitate analysis as follows:

Figure A.7. Digital image database.

The CELF Archive forms the basis for the analyses of family life reported in this volume. Each chapter elucidates the complexities of daily life and the challenges and achievements experienced by working families as they do their best to be a “good family.”

NOTES

1. Goffman 1959; Sennett 1974.

2. Goffman 1959.

3. Beeghley 2006; Bourdieu 1984; Ehrenreich 1989; Warner, Meecker, and Eells 1949.

4. Ortner 1998b, 8.

5. CELF is 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: Jeanne Arnold, Thomas Bradbury, Linda Garro, Charles Goodwin, Marjorie H. Goodwin, Kris Gutierrez, and Rena Repetti. CELF Postdoctoral Fellows: 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: 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. Additional Research Staff: Tatyana Plaksina, Julie Bernard, Brian Ellis, Satomi Kuroshima, and Maggie McKinnely. In addition, a total of 145 undergraduates have worked for CELF transcribing and coding data.

6. The Italian Center on Everyday Lives of Families (iCELF) was directed by Clotilde Pontecorvo, and the Swedish Center on Everyday Lives of Families (sCELF) was directed by Karin Aronsson from 2002 to 2005. These centers duplicated on a smaller scale (eight families were recruited in each site) the main aspects of the CELF study methodology to examine the everyday challenges that face working middle-class families in Sweden and Italy. This international comparative project has revealed how working families handle the complex demands of home and family life across the three sites and illuminated the cultural beliefs, preferences, and institutional policies that underlie these practices.