American Families have evolved markedly in our lifetimes. Ward and June Cleaver are still around, but they've been joined by a growing number of single-parent families, blended families, mixed-race adoptions, assisted reproduction, and same-sex couples.
"The demographics of marriage and family have changed pretty dramatically in the last 25 years," said psychologist Kenneth Dodge, who directs the Center for Child and Family Policy. "There has been a decoupling of marriage and parenting."
Across time and in different social settings, the behaviors of pairing up, settling down and raising children are considerably different than they were in 1957 when the Cleavers first appeared on television screens. What's behind those changes?
Marriage and family has changed since the Cleavers.
Are they symptoms of something? What do they portend for the future? Sociology department chairman S. Philip Morgan, who has written much about changes in human fertility, wanted to use the 2006-2007 SSRI Faculty Fellows Program to take a deeper dive on questions of family formation. His initial pitch was simple enough: Let's do something about family diversity and change.
"It began as a ‘what do we know and what do we need to know' kind of project," Morgan said.
"Phil's proposal sounded like an intriguing idea," Dodge said. "We shared an interest in using multiple disciplines to address issues of contemporary concern dealing with family formation." He signed on as co-convener and soon the group was on its way.
This fall, after a year of developing their ideas, the fellowship group will embark on a detailed examination of what can best be termed mating behavior and relationship formation in three starkly different settings: the college campus, the military, and low-income neighborhoods.
The fellowship is a bottom-up process, Dodge explained. It doesn't start out with a singular problem to ‘solve,' but rather brings together a handful of faculty who are interested in the same broad area. In this case, it was something to do with romantic bonds, marriage, and parenting. "That's broad, but that's what brought eight or nine people together."
SSRI faculty fellows are given release time from their home departments to participate in weekly half-day meetings and half-day study sessions. "It allows you to go from not even knowing each other to submitting a joint proposal," Morgan said.
The 2006-07 group turned out to be not only a mix of academic disciplines, but academic seniority as well, featuring endowed chairs, full professors, and fresh-out-of the- box assistant professors. Their process started with a lot of discussion, trading information about research interests and experiences, and shared readings.
"The questions sort of grew from that," Dodge said.
A focus began to form around a specific aspect of families how it is that they come to be in the first place.
For Dodge, who has spent his career investigating how adolescents become antisocial and destructive, it becomes a question of the earliest environmental influences on a child.
Biologist Susan Alberts was intrigued by an evolutionary perspective on families.She has studied how behavior affects individual fitness in baboons and elephants, but humans are another large mammal that has some pretty interesting questions in this area.
Sociologist Linda Burton, who recently joined Duke from Penn State, is an ethnographer of the families and culture of inner city America, who herself had managed to escape the teenage motherhood prevalent in Compton, Calif., where she grew up.
Labor economist Peter Arcidiacono has been studying education and discrimination, two spheres directly influencing relationship formation and mating behavior.
Developmental psychologist Nancy Hill has been working on longitudinal studies of young children to measure parental involvement and other predictors of school performance.
Psychologist Christina Gibson-Davis focuses her work on the well-being of low-income families, including how they form marriages.
Historian Felicia Kornbluh is an authority on American anti-poverty programs and welfare, and how these policies have changed the notions of childcare and family.
Sociologist Suzanne Shanahan served on Duke's Campus Culture Initiative and views her field as one that "questions and explains that which is most taken for granted and seems least in need of explanation."
"So you can see that this project really did emerge from the separate interests of the group," Morgan said. But regardless of their starting points, it all comes back to the family. "Families do a lot. Good families are good for adults too," Morgan said.
The three social settings chosen by the group include young residents of poor communities, military base culture, and university students, notorious perhaps for their freewheeling, noncommittal "hookup" culture.
Durham will be the base for the low-income study, starting with a small cohort of 14- to 15-year-old boys. Fort Bragg, a sprawling U.S. Army base in Fayetteville,
N.C., will be the home of the military study, and Duke and nearby North Carolina Central University will be the source of college students.
Morgan is also interested in exploring the romantic culture of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., which is both a military culture and a college campus. Its students the corps of cadets are high achievers, like those at Duke, but the regimented, hierarchical and closely chaperoned social life is dramatically different.
"Is there a hook-up culture at West Point?" he asked.
Initially, the study will employ surveys just to get the rough outlines of the schemas governing these behaviors. Then, with smaller groups, they can perform more in-depth interviews throughout the school year. Participants will also keep time-use diaries to log what they're doing, and when.
In each setting, there are social schemas that frame how people are expected to behave, and there are the resources to carry those expectations out, or not, as the case may be.
In college, low-commitment physical relationships are seen as harmless fun. In a poor community, such behavior is viewed as potentially destructive.
"We're trying to understand decision-making about marriage and family," Dodge said.
"Does hook-up culture affect their relationships down the road; does it affect their attitudes toward commitment?" Morgan wondered.
"How do college students learn the hookup culture?" Morgan added. "There aren't actually that many participants in it, but everybody knows the schema."
The researchers expect to find contrasts that will be enlightening. "Some of us will be surprised if we look across these three settings and the behavior isn't different," Morgan said.
Through tax policy and welfare rules, "government today spends a lot of dollars promoting marriage," Dodge said. "This is predicated on the idea that marriage is better than non-marriage, but do we really know which is better?"
"You know, this is both an intellectual opportunity and a recognition that the practical solution to problems isn't defined by disciplines," Dodge said.