For this assignment, you are expected to delve into an area of the family that most interests you. You will be exploring a specific issue dealing with what you consider to be one of the most pressing issues facing families today.
Using scholarly research and class readings and discussions, write a 5-8 pages research paper that explores an important aspect of families. In the first part of the assignment, you were asked to simply summarize the peer-reviewed journal articles and describe how you will approach your topic. In this final part of the assignment you will be expected to:
- find (at least) one additional peer-reviewed scholarly journal article in order to focus your topic and add academic weight to your assignment; [1]
- find connections and discrepancies between the readings;
- use the research you have gathered to argue the “why”, “how”, and “what” behind what you see as an important issue facing families today; and ▪ critically analyze your chosen topic.
In other words, what have you learned from your research that helps give you more insight into how/in what ways the family is affected by your chosen topic?
Organize your paper to include the following sections:
- Begin the paper with a very clear introduction in which you state your general topic/research question and the 3-5 specific themes/subtopics you will write about in the assignment.
- Demonstrate/argue that it (your topic) is a problem to/for families.
- Although not required, you are welcome to use information from the class readings, class discussion, and/or websites that I have suggested/used in class in order to make the argument that the topic you have chosen is worth paying attention to. Use current, authoritative, reliable statistics in order to give context to this issue facing families.
- Please be sure that your sources are authoritative (a .gov site is a great site to use for these purposes), and that you cite accordingly. You MUST cite the place from which you got ANY statistic that you use throughout your paper.
- Summarize the research methods (explain how the data were collected) for each of the three academic articles. This section of your paper should be approximately 1-3 paragraphs. Include the general focus of each article writing about the types of research questions each article was answering. Identify how the data were collected for each of the studies you read. (Did the researchers conduct surveys? Interviews? Use data from a larger data set?)
- Then, present 3-5 very specific issues/themes/subtopics related to your chosen topic. You should write 2-4 paragraphs per theme. These specific subtopics should emerge by finding 3-5 connections across your research. In other words, what specific aspects of your topic do all three articles discuss, and what are the findings across them related to each subtopic?
Here are some tips for finding/writing about these themes/subtopics:
- Once you have compiled all of your research (3 Sociological, academic, peer-reviewed articles published between 2000-present), look for some common findings/themes across the articles. These themes can be used as a way to organize your paper into different sections.
- One way to draw the themes from the articles is to make a list of all of the small, specific findings (that you understand and are able to write about) from each of the three articles. Then, look across those three lists (one for each article) to see how those findings could be connected. Those connections will make up each subtopic/theme around which your paper should be organized.
- As you discuss each theme/subtopic, you should use all of your applicable research in order to explain and give support to each particular aspect of your topic.
- Take advantage of some of the overlap between your articles in order to give additional support and detail to each section. The best papers will highlight the connections across the research, weaving the findings from each of your articles together based on these 3-5 subtopics.
- Some of the most interesting claims will lie in the very specific details and findings across your research. Use these details in order to give weight to a particular point you are making.
- It may be useful to use each theme/subtopic as a subheading in your paper. Under that subheading present all of the research you have from each article related to that theme/subtopic.
- Your articles do not have to reach the same conclusion(s)/report the same findings about these aspects of your topic. In fact, it may be interesting to explore why two (or more) of your articles started with similar questions, but got different results.
- End your assignment with a conclusion in which you highlight the major conclusions you are able to draw based on the connections across the research you read. According to the research you presented in your paper, how/in what ways are families affected by your particular topic? A conclusion should not include any new information that is not already in the paper, but is, instead, a way to highlight and bring together the most important insight about your topic that you wrote about in your paper.
- The final paper MUST include in-text citations and a references page. Every time you use any information from another source – whether you are quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing – you must cite the source in your text where you use the information, and have a properly formatted references page at the end of your paper.
A few notes about the assignment expectations:
- The assignment should reflect findings from scholarly research. Although the use of popular media accounts and online information is acceptable, it should not take the place of academic literature. You should have no fewer than 3 scholarly sources. (We have learned in class about what constitutes a scholarly, peer reviewed article. Some good journals in which to search include, but are certainly not limited to: American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Sociological Inquiry, Journal of Marriage and the Family, etc.)
- The assignment should be approximately 5-8 pages typed, double-spaced, 12 point font. I am not strict about page limits – say what you have to say in the length you need to say it. (I would find it difficult to accomplish the goals of this paper in less than about 4 pages or so, and anything more than about 10 pages is getting a bit too long…but I’m giving you relative freedom in terms of length.) I care much more about quality than quantity.
- Please be sure to include working links or additional attachments of all of the journal articles that you use for this paper. (In total, at least three of your sources should be peer reviewed, scholarly journal articles.)
Below I’m going to attach a draft of part one of the assignment and some articles that may work.
In today’s paper we will be looking at how families are spending their time. In the article “Free Time and Emotional Well-Being” we look at the disparities in leisure time between gender and how that leisure time is expressed differently emotionally between mothers and fathers. In the following article “A Widening Parental Leisure Gap” we see the disadvantage and leisure time for parents with children compared to those who do not. Between both articles the main focus will be families and how those correlates to leisure time.
Families in general are very complex and there’s endless topics that one can be talk about, but I was very interested in time. How our daily routines and habits collectively make the amount of time that spent on things important to us. But while spending time on things important such as family and work it’s also important to have downtime in particular leisure time. Important to study how we spend and how much leisure time we do have. And then eventually seeing how that leisure time plays a part on our individual experience and how we interact with others.
The first article we’re going to look at is by Shira Offer titled “FREE TIME AND EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING: Do Dual-Earner Mothers and Father” this article looks at the disparities and leisure time between mothers and fathers. And particularly looks at how mothers and fathers spend about the same amount of time on leisure activities. But it is shown that fathers tend to have more pure free time. While mothers tend to spend their free time on things such as unpaid work and spending time in leisure with children. They also looked at the association between free time with children and leisure time with other adults and they found that fathers had a more positive affect to free time with children. Whereas mothers had a more positive association with adult leisure time.
In this article the research methods used were analysis from data of 500 families. All being dual earning middle class Americans from different communities across the United States with children. The families were recruited from 1999 through 2000 and they were found through advertisements in newspapers and posts at local schools. It is a mixed method study which consists of and administered survey and a time diary they also use the experience sampling method parentheses (ESM) which collects information about participants time usage and emotional experience in their natural environment. The ESM used a wristband that randomly beeped eight times during the participants waking hours each day for one consecutive week. Participants were then prompted to record and a notebook what they were doing, who they were with, and how they were feeling in that instant. They were also in particularly asked to specific questions one “what was the main thing you were doing” and the secondary question was “what else were you doing at this time”. Then through categorization they were put into four main categories: paid work, unpaid work, personal care, and free time. From then the category of free time was composed of other activities such as hobbies, reading, listening to music, socializing with friends, watching TV. They then attributed the primary free time beeps by the secondary activity in which they were engaging in. Then the category pure free time refers to beeps in which the participant reported a primary free time activity with no secondary activity. They also continued to break down free time even more with three different forms of free time free time with unpaid work free time with paid work and free time with personal care. When asking these questions, they also wanted to know who was with the participant which created adult free time free time with children and free time with family.
Many previous study studies have suggested that there are gender differences and the quality, and the amount of free time people have. But throughout this article they used appropriate data of quantitative methods to show the different aspects of leisure time by employed mothers and fathers. This being consistent with other studies done in the past mothers again I shown to be disadvantaged and the fact that they are less likely to have Pierre free time than fathers, and we’re more likely to combine leisure time with unpaid work. These findings also somewhat show that mothers may have a higher commitment to family roles because of the sacrifice women tend to make with their free time in correlation to family demand. Although mothers in the study did not seem to benefit any less from leisure time then the fathers did. They also observed that mothers when engaging in time for themselves felt more guilty. Both fathers and mothers reported higher well-being when they engaged and pure free time and this Association did not differ in gender. Regarding pure free time, it was found that there is a much larger share of fathers participating in so then mothers. A pattern found in adult free time was similar while both mothers and fathers spent about 14% of their waking time engaged in adult leisure activity the distribution of adult free time out of participants total number of free time beeps were larger and fathers then mothers. This suggest that when fathers have free time, they are more likely than mothers to spend that free time with adults only or by themselves. Though this association between adult free time was slightly stronger among mothers and fathers this it does show that mothers may have more positive benefit from adult free time than fathers. When it comes to engaging in free time with children fathers on average spend less time with their children and so they value the free time spent with children. Although the article does go on to mention that this may be because fathers receive more acknowledgment and positive reinforcement from their surroundings/society when they engage with free time activities with their children because its aspect of “involved fatherhood”. Although fathers may value free time spent with children more than mothers, they only spend about 13% of time engaging in free time activities with children compared to 22% for mothers spending free time with children. But fathers are more likely to spend engaging in free time activities with family than mothers, but they are still less likely to do so in the company of only children.
Secondly in the article “A Widening Parental Leisure Gap: The Family as a Site for Late Modern Differentiation and Convergence in Leisure Time within Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States” we are looking at the findings and how they show a heightened disadvantage in leisure time to parents with young children. Particularly how many people account for being overworked and double burdened on available leisure time/free time. This article looks to answer four questions one being is the amount of time allotted to leisure time becoming more differentiated by employment and parental status? Two, given similar liberal welfare state regimens in Canada the United States in the United Kingdom are similar trends and patterns of differentiation evident? Third is time for leisure converging on the bias of gender? And lastly add to what extent is change in leisure the result of compositional changes in the demographic characterized of populations in different survey periods?
In this article they use data from the Multinational Time use survey. And a harmonize data set of randomly collected time use service was utilized in their analysis. Data from only Canada the United States, and the United Kingdom were selected because these nations had the most similar measures over multiple surveyors that represented change from 1960 and onward. The surveys from Canada were conducted in 1971, 1981, 1986, 1992, and 1999. The surveys from the United States were conducted in 1965, 1975, 1985, 1992, 1998 and 2003. The surveys in the UK were administered in 1974, 1983, 1987, 1995, and 2000. All three-share common economic systems and share parliamentary political systems and all three have been classified as liberal welfare state regiments. These time use diaries were collected for one or more days. Diaries from Canada and the United States collected time use data for one diary day. Data collected from the UK included a week’s worth of diary entries. Diaries from all these surveys were put together to make a daily average per respondent. They weighed this analysis by using MTUS recommended sample weights. The MTUS uses each individual nations originally purpose sample to account for sampling design and specific oversampling of subgroups that may have occurred. They used a variable parental status that has three different categories one being children above the age of 52 children five years of age and younger and three refers to the category of no children at all. Employment status was also taken into account with full-time and part-time employment specific. Gender specific and the category for male as the reference category and they also had a category for those in marital or common law partnerships and those without partners.
On average the weekly leisure time is higher than in the mid-1960s and the early 1970s when data was first collected. The average amount of leisure time in each nation is similar the UK has more leisure time by the last year for which the data was collected though the US has somewhat less leisure time. Results for leisure time show that overall, the US has the lowest leisure time, and the highest leisure time is given to the United Kingdom. Leisure time increased in the UK after 1987. In Canada leisure time increased from 1971 but then remained the same throughout the 1980s in the late 1990s. In the United States leisure time has been increasing throughout 1965 to 1985 but there was a considerable decrease by 1998 only to come back by 2003. In correlation to demographic characteristics within the population it is not a strong variable for accounting the amount of time on leisure. But I statistical crossed all is that leisure time among women is much lower in each country than for men. Also, when having a partner your leisure time is diminished. Those that are part time employees have a larger amount of leisure time than those who are full-time employees. But leisure time for full-time employees is still less in America and in Canada compared to those of full-time employment in the UK. In correlation to leisure time in age those with the highest amount of leisure time or in the younger part of their life cycle and the older part of their life cycle. When the major life consumption is parenthood and work there is a much larger demand for domestic work and regular work leaving less time for leisure. Those who have children under the age of five give us the second largest factor leading to decreasing leisure time. There is no effect on leisure time when including higher education in the United States and Canada while in the UK they predict there is a small gain and leisure time the suggesting that cultural and human capital may have much more importance to leisure time within the UK. They also conclude that increasing stress and decreasing opportunities for leisure time among parents with young children and the existing family relationships are undergoing reorganization. These strains that are resulting in stress are a result of cost being paid in time by parents of young children and that the cost of parenting and reproduction through social and family policy. They also noted that the stage and wish you were in your life cycle is increasingly influential on how much leisure time you will have. And that leisure time is increasingly becoming more unequal for those who parent and raise children. Leading to higher workloads and Hmong working parents therefore leaving them to have much less time in leisure and spending more time on reproduction and production activities. Lastly, they noted without providing families with resources to manage the transition towards all are created equal patterns of work and family life we are going to see the inequality and leisure time grow and we must better public policy on the structure of work and family life so this impact of distribution of leisure within society becomes more equal.
The connection through this paper is once again definitely leisure time/free time and how that’s allotted to people and society. Whether you have children whether you don’t have children, how old your children are, how old you are, if you’re a man, woman, or nonbinary, do you have a full-time job or a part-time job, those are all examples of how leisure time is given to you because of your state of life. The information that I’ve gained from these two research papers is definitely going to make me focus more on who has leisure time what they use their leisure time for and how beneficial that leisure time is. The common theme that I saw through both articles was that women are far less likely to have leisure time than men whether that be in aspects of with children or without more so with children we see that they are much more disadvantage to having leisure time/free time. When first approaching my paper, I wanted to look at well-being of families in particular the well-being of parents so it’s interesting to see that when I was searching for the well-being, I continuously got brought back to leisure time/free time, so I’m interested to see and where this takes me for my final paper.
Parents’ Family Time and Work Schedules: The Split-Shift Schedule in Spain Author(s): Pablo Gracia and Matthijs Kalmijn Source: Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 78, No. 2 (April 2016), pp. 401-415 Published by: National Council on Family Relations Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24734726 Accessed: 06-05-2022 21:26 UTC
Parenthood and Well-Being: The Moderating Role of Leisure and Paid Work Author(s): Anne Roeters, Jornt J. Mandemakers and Marieke Voorpostel Source: European Journal of Population / Revue Européenne de Démographie , August 2016, Vol. 32, No. 3, Special Issue on The Parenthood Happiness Puzzle (August 2016), pp. 381-401 Published by: Springer Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24801654
Mothers’ Time Choices: Caregiving, Leisure, Home Production, and Paid Work Author(s): Jean Kimmel and Rachel Connelly Source: The Journal of Human Resources , Summer, 2007, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Summer, 2007), pp. 643-681 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40057322
Weekend Work and Leisure Time With Family and Friends: Who Misses Out? Author(s): Lyn Craig and Judith E. Brown Source: Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 76, No. 4 (August 2014), pp. 710-727 Published by: National Council on Family Relations Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24582741 Accessed: 06-05-2022 21:26 UTC
A Widening Parental Leisure Gap: The Family as a Site for Late Modern Differentiation and Convergence in Leisure Time within Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States Author(s): Glenn J. Stalker Source: The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie , Vol. 36, No. 1 (2011), pp. 25-58 Published by: Canadian Journal of Sociology Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/canajsocicahican.36.1.25
FREE TIME AND EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING: Do Dual-Earner Mothers and Fathers Differ? Author(s): SHIRA OFFER Source: Gender and Society , April 2016, Vol. 30, No. 2 (April 2016), pp. 213-239 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24756199
