Work and Family Life. Phase 1. Final Report.

This is the first of a series of working papers and reports on aspects of modern American families. It investigates the issues and problems facing families with preschool children, when both of the parents are employed. The composite portrait of family styles within a sample of 14 young families begins with a project history. The literature is reviewed, the inception of the project described, and the research design presented. To discover how individuals view their families and relate to them, five research instruments, all appended, were developed: interviews; daily logs; demographic forms; observation instructions; and participant observations. The following chapters each deal with an aspect of one of the series of transformations initiated in the organization of the home by the wife's working. These include allocation of child care and household responsibilities; nonparental child care; pressures, motivations, and satisfactions of parenting in dual-working families; and the coordination of home and work. It was generally concluded that the effects of maintaining primary control over child care are widespread in the family system, that the consequences of the decision of the wife to work extend to the relations between the spouses, and that an image of the irritable wife and mother was one response of the working mother who accepts all cultural expectations without awareness of the psychological strain this induces. Also appended are staff autobiographies, an informed consent document, and coding topics. (Author/KSM)