Journal of Marriage and Family最新文献

Objective

This article examines whether performing location-based platform work is associated with greater work–family conflict—and if this association is stronger for those relying on labor platforms for their primary employment.

Background

Digital labor platforms project a vision of flexibility and improved work-family balance for workers; however, empirical evidence supporting these promises remains elusive. While platform workers are normally offered the freedom to choose their work hours, the efforts of labor platforms to algorithmically manage workers' schedules may encourage an ‘always-on’ approach to work that pressures workers to prioritize work availability that exacerbates work–family conflicts.

Method

We conducted three national surveys of Canadian workers in 2020, 2021, and 2022. Based on pooled survey data (N = 10,483), structural equational modeling was used to investigate (1) the relationship between location-based platform work and work–family conflict and (2) the mediating role of work-family role blurring—captured by work contact outside of normal working hours.

Results

We discovered that platform workers, compared to employees and the traditional self-employed, reported greater work–family conflict—conflicts that were especially pronounced for those relying on labor platforms as their primary source of income. These patterns were partially explained by platform workers' increased exposure to work contact outside of work hours.

Conclusion

Our findings question the assertion that digital labor platforms provide enhanced flexibility for managing work and family demands. Instead, we contend that the instability inherent in platform work blurs and disrupts work-family role boundaries, disproportionately favoring labor platforms and their clientele at the expense of workers' familial responsibilities.

Objective

This study documents the importance of grandparents for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) Latinx youth and how cisnormativity shapes these relationship dynamics.

Background

Most research on LGBTQ+ youth's family relations centers on the parent–child relationship. Grandparents are important for racially marginalized families, particularly Latinx families. Additionally, Latinx LGBTQ+ youth are impacted by precarious familismo—the disparate experiences with family members in which their gender and sexuality are simultaneously accepted and rejected.

Method

The data for this project are from the Family Housing and Me (FHAM) project, a landmark longitudinal study on the impact of non-parental relatives on the lives of LGBTQ+ youth. This paper analyzes a subsample of 35 qualitative interviews with Latinx LGBTQ+ youth (16–19 years old) who live in South Texas or the Inland Empire of California, the majority of whom are transgender or nonbinary.

Results

Grandparents played an important role in the lives of Latinx LGBTQ+ youth interviewees, including providing many of the positive benefits of familismo. The youth also described “disparate experiences” of precarious familismo in how their grandparents simultaneously attempted identity support of their gender identities and reinforced cisnormativity. Youth often navigated these experiences by expressing low expectations that their grandparents would fully understand their gender identities, which we refer to as generational gender expectations.

Conclusion

Research on LGBTQ+ youth should integrate the study of non-parental relatives to fully understand support networks and family systems for LGBTQ+ youth. Additionally, cisnormativity plays an important role in family life and familismo.

Objective

This study examined the underlying, unseen meanings accompanying the progressive verification of the reunification process experienced by American Indian fostered/adopted relatives who were separated from family of origin as children.

Background

Reunification is most often explored as an outcome (i.e., a result) and few studies examine the process of reunification (i.e., what happens or what facilitates it) or the underlying meaning of the reunification process for American Indian fostered/adopted relatives.

Method

A secondary data analysis was conducted on survey data from the Experiences of Adopted and Fostered Individuals Project. The sample consisted of 70 American Indian relatives who were fostered/adopted as children and reunified as adults. Thematic analysis was conducted on open-ended survey data.

Results

Four themes emanated from the data including: (1) searching, (2) facilitating, (3) calling home, and (4) repatriating. Participants searched for their families of origin using information and records (i.e., names of birth family, birth/adoption records). Reunification was facilitated by agencies, hired professionals, courts, and tribes. Relatives were called home by family, tribe, and ancestors. They repatriated through mail, phone, social media, and registries.

Conclusion

This study contributed to the literature by using place identity theory to understand the progressive nature of the perceptions and comprehensions experienced by American Indian relatives during the reunification process. Place identity verification undergirds the process of reunification for American Indian fostered/adopted relatives including the underlying, unseen meanings that accompany the reunification process.

Objective

This study advances contemporary theories of motherhood, mothering, and foodwork within the context of poverty by focusing on the ways that low-income Black mothers engage interdependent culturally distinct mothering strategies in light of a porous social safety net.

Background

Contemporary standards for good parenting are increasingly resource-based.

As such, the intricate and tactical ways that low-income Black mothers manage to make food ends meet with little means and few resources are often obscured in favor of hegemonic forms of mothering.

Method

This study draws on 44 in-depth interviews with low-income Black mothers and grandmothers to examine their survival strategies, focusing on food provision.

Results

Findings reveal that these mothers prioritize basic needs provision, such as food and feeding, and achieve this often difficult goal by engaging a cultural toolkit that we term symbiotic mothering. Symbiotic mothering is constructed and reinforced through the collective processes of maternal exchange, mutual aid and resource pooling, and the intergenerational and horizontal transmission of cultural knowledges, values, and practices.

Conclusions

While there is a wealth of scholarship interrogating the ways Black women deviate from dominant mothering expectations, symbiotic mothering highlights the unique cultural skillsets these mothers actively engage to meet the everyday demands of mothering, particularly related to food provision.

Objective

This article introduces supervised machine learning (ML) for conducting exploratory, discovery-oriented family research in a transparent and systematic way.

Background

Supervised ML can examine large numbers of variable simultaneously, identify key predictors, and explore patterns among predictors—an approach that may help address concerns in family research about lack of theoretical specificity and prevalence of unguided exploratory analysis.

Method

Following an overview of supervised ML, example analyses drew on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) dataset across Waves I–IV (N = 5114 adolescents, 50.53% female, M_age = 15.94, SD = 1.77 at Wave I). From 143 articles using Add Health data Waves I through IV, 62 adolescent family variables from eight domains (e.g., socioeconomics, parenting, health) were identified as predictors of young adult (ages 24–32) educational attainment. Following benchmark regression models, ML models were trained using Lasso regression, decision tree, random forest, and extreme gradient boosting; these were tested separately from training data and interpreted through SHapley Additive exPlanations.

Results

The random forest model performed best (R² = .382 for the model with all the predictors): 14 variables were identified to be the key predictors of educational attainment. Patterns among these predictors, including directionality, nonlinearity and interactions emerged.

Conclusions

Supervised ML research can be used to inform further confirmatory analyses and advance theory.

Objective

Changes in family dynamics due to increased union instability are gathering scholarly attention. Against this backdrop, we asked: How do family life courses evolve after the dissolution of a first union? And, how do these processes vary across socio-historical contexts?

Method

We deployed sequence and cluster analysis on women's combined relationship and fertility trajectories over 120 months after the dissolution of the first union using survey data from the Harmonized Histories datasets. Context-level variation was assessed by comparing a series of measures of heterogeneity in family life courses across separation cohorts (1970–2009) and countries (France, the Netherlands, Poland, the Russian Federation, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom).

Results

We found substantial heterogeneity in family life courses that we inferred from a typology of trajectory pathways. We also found relevant dynamics across socio-historical contexts. Post-separation trajectories became more diverse (between-individual heterogeneity) and complex (within-individual heterogeneity) in recent periods among countries that we deem laggards in the diffusion of union dissolution, whereas path dependencies in post-separation family paths could be identified amongst the forerunners.

Conclusion

We conclude that increased union instability across different population groups generally contributes to the heterogenization of family life courses, but national contexts are also important in shaping family trajectories upon union dissolution.

Objective

We aimed to explore dyadic latent classes of intergenerational solidarity with digital communication (texting, video call, and social media interaction) among older parent and adult child pairs during the COVID-19 pandemic, and whether derived dyadic latent classes were associated with older parents' and adult children's depressive symptoms.

Background

Previous studies have not considered how digital communication fits with the established intergenerational solidarity paradigm. Consequently, we know little about how the use of digital communication creates new types of intergenerational solidarity between older parents and adult children, and how they are associated with their depressive symptoms during the pandemic.

Methods

Using data from the 2022 survey of the Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSOG), the analysis took a dyadic-centered approach and applied a three-step latent class analysis with 271 mother–child and 190 father–child dyads.

Results

Dyadic partners were consistent in their relationship evaluations for the three latent classes identified in both mother–child and father–child dyads: tight-knit traditional (strong solidarity with frequent in-person contact), distant-but-digitally connected (geographically distant but frequent digital contact), and detached (low solidarity). In mother–child dyads, mothers reported significantly fewer depressive symptoms when they were in tight-knit traditional and distant-but-digitally connected relationships, than those in detached relationships. In father–child dyads, adult children reported significantly fewer depressive symptoms when they were in tight-knit traditional and distant-but-digitally connected relationships, than those in detached relationships.

Conclusions

These findings suggest that digital communication was beneficial for older parents' and adult children's psychological well-being, depending on parents' gender and generational position during the pandemic.