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Essay on The American Family is Not Changing for the Better
Recent shifts in the composition of session topics at the annual meetings of the Population Association of America (PAA) provide revealing evidence of the extent of growth of family demography in recent years. Between the late 1960s and the late 1980s, the number of paper and panel sessions at the PAA meetings grew from about 5 percent to about 15 percent of the total sessions.
By the late 1980s, more paper and panel sessions were devoted to family and household demography than to any other topic, and the total number of sessions on family demography was second only to fertility. What lies behind this rapid growth in social-demographic approaches to the family? Certainly changing demographic realities, the decline in marriage rates and the rise in divorce, the alarming expansion of female-headed households, important changes in household composition, the reallocation of tasks within households, among others -- account for some of this recent curiosity. That these demographic shifts are linked so closely to issues of poverty, inequality, and well-being undoubtedly increases our motivation to know more about these changes.
Demographic change has been a constant throughout this century, so these trends and their correlates can probably not account for all of the contemporary interest in family demography. Rather, we suspect that two other forces have played important roles in the growth of this field. The first of these is a greater willingness among demographers to look outside the demographic system, strictly defined, for explanations of demographic change. More purely demographic approaches to family issues are still taken, but the general trend, we sense, is away from insular designs and toward multidisciplinary perspectives. Facilitating the mutual embrace of demography, sociology, and history illustrated in this collection of chapters is the growing number of researchers with expertise in two or more of these fields.....
