Special Opportunity for Interested Students: Work/Family Research

I'm currently involved in a research project that examines how class and race/ethnic groups vary in how they integrate their work and family lives.  Most of the current scholarly and popular literature focuses on upper and upper-middle class women married to men with high salaries.  This focus has led to a zero-sum approach to the study of work/family:  women choose either work or family.  I argue differently:  most women (like men) both work and have families, at the same time, and this is especially likely to be true among nonwhite race/ethnic groups.  I plan to follow up on previous work I conducted on managerial women in dual-earner marriages to interview women (or possibly men) from a broader array of class and race/ethnic groups.  This will provide a substantially richer understanding of the experiences of today's working families than currently exists in the literature.  

I will allow up to five students from the Intro to Research Methods course to participate in this project. Note that this participation will involve more of a time commitment than the regular route of writing a final paper from secondary data (the General Social Survey). Instead, you will write your final paper on work/family issues, using interview data from at least five respondents (to be chosen in consultation with me), supplemented with data from the GSS. As well, a number of your assignments will be adapted to move you toward your final paper.

This opportunity is especially appropriate for those of you contemplating graduate school in sociology, since you would gain experience both in qualitative research and secondary data analysis.

Requirements to participate:

1) interest in work/family issues
2) at least a 3.0 overall GPA
3) good writing and analytic skills
4) good interpersonal skills for interviewing
5) excellent work in first two course assignments (Assignments 1 and 2)
6) human subjects certification (either online, or through a 3-hour session I will give on October 11th); you must register for this session through an email to me

If you think you might be interested in this opportunity, please talk with me in the first few weeks of the course, but no later than October 1st.