Culture, Structure, Identity, and Family Change
Highlights from the Culture Meeting
June 13-14, 2005
Demographic and Behavioral Sciences Branch
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people made the Culture Meeting possible. Christine Bachrach (NICHD), Phil Morgan (Duke University), Jenna Johnson-Hanks (University of California, Berkeley), Hans-Peter Kohler (University of Pennsylvania) and Caroline Bledsoe (Northwestern University) organized the Meeting. Diane Eagle, Janice Wahlman, Brittany Dawson and Leila Rodriguez (NICHD) provided logistical support. Leila Rodriguez wrote the final report.
INTRODUCTION
This report summarizes the results of the Culture Meeting held on June 13-14, 2005, at the Demographic and Behavioral Sciences Branch (DBSB) of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), National Institutes of Health. Co-hosted by the Explaining Family Change Project (EFC) and Duke University, the Meeting’s primary goal was the brainstorming of ways to incorporate the concepts of culture and identity into demographic research.
Demographic research cuts across many of the other social science disciplines. Common themes and even common research methods do not, however, translate into a common understanding of concepts. Because the invited scholars come from different disciplinary backgrounds (anthropology, sociology, demography, economics), a second necessary goal was to find synergies and contradictions in the ways that social scientists think about these notions.
The Explaining Family Change Project is a multidisciplinary undertaking towards the development of new models for understanding family variation and change. It aims to answer two basic questions: why do individuals organize into family units; and what accounts for how families are organized. Throughout this report, the different paradigms used to think about culture and identity will be related to these two basic questions; specifically to how each perspective can shed light into answering them.
Each section of this report corresponds to one of the seven presentations at the Culture Meeting. A short paragraph summarizing the topic presented is followed by a more detailed review of the presentation’s key points. This, in turn, is followed by a bulleted list of questions raised from the presentation, and a paragraph on the ensuing discussion. The final section of the report summarizes the synergies and contradictions in the way the different perspectives treat concepts of culture and identity. The theories and models we use affect the paths along which we reason. This report provides seven different ways of thinking about family change, which will hopefully lead to new questions and answers.
Date: 2015-01-12; view: 662
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