Continuity and Change in the American Family

Rating:
Summary: An award winning book
Review: This book was awarded the 2002 Otis Dudley Duncan award by the American Sociological Association. The following is an excerpt from the award presentation.

In Continuity and Change in the American Family, Lynne Casper and Suzanne Bianchi lead us on a journey through family life in the contemporary U.S. and recent changes therein. They provide a comprehensive and rich description of the social demography of the family. Like Rogers, Hummer, and Nam, they are painstaking and careful and do an outstanding job synthesizing, reporting and summarizing an enormous amount of material.

Topics include cohabitation, childbearing, single mother families, fathering, grandparenthood, child care, child wellbeing, the economic causes and consequences of family structure, combining work and family. Each of these topics, in themselves, is nearly a tome. (For example, the chapter entitled "Economic Causes and Consequences of Changing Family Structure" includes treatment of trends in income and poverty; the feminization of poverty; changing employment and earnings of women; declining male wages; the juvenilization of poverty; children's material hardship; income inequality; the linkage between changing economics and family formation; the importance of male income for marriage market; women's economic independence; and the consequences of marital disruption for mothers and fathers.)

Throughout, Casper and Bianchi provide a rich blend of past research and theory along with original analyses of new data. These analyses suggest a "quieting" of family change and kudos to the authors for never letting the truth be compromised by exaggerated claims.

I know my fellow Committee and Section members join me in congratulating you for jobs well done -- producing works that belong on all of our shelves, those of our students, those of policymakers, and those curious about state-of-the-art knowledge about mortality and the family. It is a joy and an honor to present the 2002 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Demography to Lynne Casper and Suzanne Bianchi, and to Rick Rogers, Bob Hummer, and Charles Nam.