Journal of Marriage and Family最新文献

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

This study examines, for the first time in Canada, the relationship between how different-sex couples meet and assortative mating on education, race, nativity, and age.

Background

Extending research on how the likelihood of heterogamy differed between offline and online dating, this study disentangles the implications of institutional and third-person influences from those of online dating for configuring the patterns of heterogamy and gender asymmetry in assortative mating.

Method

Data from a 2018 national survey are analyzed using (multinomial) logit models.

Results

Educational heterogamy and nativity heterogamy are higher, but age heterogamy appears lower, in online than offline dating. Next, specific channels of offline dating—formal institutions, social ties, and other channels—are distinguished and compared with online dating. Online dating tends to entail higher educational and nativity heterogamy (vs. meeting through formal institutions), higher racial and nativity heterogamy but lower age heterogamy (vs. meeting through social ties), and higher educational heterogamy (vs. meeting through other offline channels). Further considering gender asymmetry shows that online dating is associated with higher educational hypergyny (more-educated man, less-educated woman) than meeting through other offline channels; higher nativity hypogyny (immigrant man, native-born woman) than meeting offline (overall, formal institutions, social ties); and lower age hypergyny (older man, younger woman) than meeting offline through social ties.

Conclusion

The findings help untangle the roles of institutional, social, and digital forces in shaping assortative mating. They illustrate the importance of leveraging theoretically informed comparisons to understand how online and offline dating configures assortative mating and its gender-asymmetric patterns.

Objective

Drawing upon family systems theory, Burton's childhood adultification model, and Johnson's typology of domestic violence (DV), the objective of this qualitative study was to understand the adultification experiences of young adults who were exposed to DV while growing up.

Background

Exposure to DV negatively impacts familial dynamics, disrupting healthy boundaries between caregivers and children. Often associated with families experiencing poverty, adultification is a type of boundary infringement that places children in adult-like roles to execute essential family tasks with potentially dangerous and developmentally harmful effects. A growing body of literature documents how youth are agentic in navigating their family dynamics and how abusive partners use children as abuse tools. However, adultification in a DV context remains understudied.

Method

Using a qualitative study design, the research team interviewed 23 college-attending young adults with father-mother-perpetrated DV exposure histories who resided in the Southeastern United States. The qualitative data were analyzed using theoretical thematic analysis.

Findings

We identified five distinct yet interrelated ways in which young adults with DV exposure histories experienced adultification: intervening to protect mothers from violence, serving as mothers' emotional support system, shielding siblings from violence and conflict, caring for siblings' daily needs, and managing parents' health and well-being. The young adults categorized as exposed to coercive controlling violence described more extensive adultification.

Conclusion

Centering adultification in the context of family violence provides a lens through which researchers, practitioners, and other professionals can understand how DV impacts family dynamics, including adultified children.

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.

Objective

The present study set out to investigate how all the members, including children, of nuclear US families conceptualize a fair division of household labor.

Background

The majority of the literature has focused on how couples perceive their family's division of labor. However, for many households, children are also present and potentially involved in the division of household chores. Thus there is a need to investigate how the whole family, rather than just couples, perceive and understand the fairness of the family's division of labor.

Methods

This study employed thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with all family members of nine primarily White US middle-class families (N = 33).

Results

This study found two main themes: (1) the kids don't do enough and that's not fair, and (2) if we agree and are happy, then it's fair. The findings highlight how children's involvement is considered in fairness evaluations, whereas a specific amount of labor is often considered less important than emotional satisfaction and agreement.

Conclusion

Children are seen as important actors in conceptualizing a fair division of labor. Generational differences highlighted distinct understandings about the possibility of equality suggesting that the role of the (im)possibility of a type of division may result in other factors being used to evaluate whether a division is fair.

Implications

Future studies on fairness perceptions should include both children's perceptions and expectations for their involvement by both children and parents, to better understand how family's approach conceptualizing the division of their household's labor.