“A Kiss for Mother, A Hug for Dad”: The Early 20th Century Parents’ Day Campaign

Father’s Day and Mother’s Day occupy sacred positions in American society—at least today. Unbeknownst to many, however, there was a campaign in the 1920s and 1930s to change Father’s Day and Mother’s Day to Parents’ Day, so that fathers and mothers would be honored on the same day. The campaign, based in New York City, was essentially a debate about the cultural position of parents in American society. How the campaign came to be—and why, in the end, it failed—illustrate the political maneuvering that characterizes people’s efforts to draw symbolic boundaries around fatherhood and motherhood

Primary Group Contact and Elderly Morale: An Exchange/Power Analysis

Using a sample of 757 middle-aged and older residents of the Atlanta metropolitan region, the relationship between primary group contact and morale was investigated. Controlling on sex and dependency, it was found that interaction with children had a negative impact on the morale of dependent, older males. This finding was explained in terms of the power-dependence relationships that exist within the family. It was argued that visits with children and grandchildren are perceived by the dependent older male as a drama in which the ascending generations legitimate their claims to leadership through a gradual process of situation redefinition. One manifest result of having to cede control to his middle-aged offspring is lower morale

Conflict r power in marriage : expecting the first child

170 p.; 21 cm

Sampling richness and qualitative integrity: Challenges for research with families

Sampling is one of the most difficult and contentious aspects of qualitative research design. There are few guidelines for sampling decisions or for understanding saturation in qualitative family research. The authors frame the problematic of data quality in the selection of units of analysis and observation and consider how to enhance sample richness. They outline considerations for data quantity and sample size as well as case- and variable-based approaches. With multiple examples from recent and classic studies to illustrate the consequences of sampling decisions, they explore links between saturation and validity. Finally, they encourage researchers to craft a coherent statement on qualitative integrity to demonstrate how their sampling decisions are rooted in epistemology, theory, and richness and quality of data

The Fluctuating Image of the 20th Century American Father

A sample of 223 family cartoons published in the Saturday Evening Post from 1924 to 1944 were analyzed for the extent to which the father figures and mother figures in the cartoon were depicted as incompetent. The rationale behind the study, following Day and Mackey (1986), was to see whether the image of the American father had changed significantly in the early part of the 20th century. Day and Mackey\u27s findings led them to conclude that the 1970s marked an unprecedented shift in the paradigm through which fathers were viewed. The study, however, indicates that a similar shift had occurred in the 1930s and early 1940s, and proposes that the image of the 20th century American father has changed not once but at least twice, and that the pattern of change is not linear, as is commonly held, but one of fluctuation