Relationships And Well-being Over The Life Stages

Features

Description

Recent social trends, including the increased employment of women, the dramatic growth in single-parent households, heightened attention to the aging of the population and to older families, and changing attitudes toward gender roles, guide the focus of this study that considers personal characteristics and family relationships and how they are linked with well-being over the life course.

Pat Keith and Robert Schafer discuss how these trends have profoundly affected work/family relationships and how the far-reaching social, demographic, and economic implications of these changes inform some of the vital concerns of particular groups including one and two-job families, single-parent women and their married counterparts, older and younger couples, and modern and traditional spouses.

Throughout, the focus is on variation in well-being--self-concept, role strain, and mental health--over the adult life course and the factors that may foster it at various life stages and in different family situations. The study offers observations on persons in different circumstances across the life course that are not often included in the same research but that have produced and will continue to produce lasting changes in the structure of American society.

Following two early chapters that set forth the study's guiding concepts, goals, and methodology, Chapters Three through Five assess work and well-being in one- and two-job families and equity in the marriage relationship and examine gender roles in the family, focusing on older families in particular.

Typologies of marriages and the self-concept in an intimate relationship are investigated in the next two chapters. The final chapters study gender-role attitudes, characteristics of employment, and well-being of single and married employed mothers; food behavior and diet over the life stages; and families over the life stages.

Scholars, students, and researchers in sociology of the family, sex roles, and aging, as well as demographers interested in the consequences of the marital status, will find the insights of this important new study timely and valuable to their work. Review: ?Keith and Schafer (Iowa State University) have extensive professional experience in the area of family studies and have produced an interesting study of a family survey in Iowa.

Families were classified into five life stages: two-parent households with at least one child under six; two-parent households with at least one child between 6 and 18; married-couple households with no children and wife between 45 and 59 years; married-couple households with no children and wife 60 years or over; and single-parent households with at least one child under 19 years.

These stages are examined in terms of work and family-role relationships and how these influence psychological well-being. Evaluations of roles include assessments of equity/inequity, satisfaction/dissatisfaction, and relative deprivation of work-family roles. Well-being is measured in terms of self-concept, role strain, and depression.

The treatment of these and other subjects is systematic throughout the study and the statistical results are clearly presented. Although the data are drawn from only one state, the results warrant close attention by others working in this field. Current bibliography and a brief index. Should be included in any academic library with holdings in family research at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.--T.E.

Steahr, University of Connecticut.?-Choice