LOS ANGELES: From 2002 to 2005, before
reality TV ruled the earth, researchers at the University of California, Los
Angeles, laboriously recruited 32 local families, videotaping nearly every
waking, at-home moment during a week. At a conference here this month, more than
70 social scientists gathered to bring to a close one of the most unusual, and
oddly voyeuristic, anthropological studies ever conceived.
Filmmakers
have turned a lens on the minutiae of unscripted domestic life before, perhaps
most famously in 'The Osbournes' on MTV. But the UCLA project was an effort to
capture a new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child,
middle-class American household. The investigators have just finished working
through the 1,540 hours of videotape, coding and categorizing every hug and
every tantrum.
"This is the richest, most detailed, most complete
database of middle-class family living in the world," said Thomas Weisner, a
professor of anthropology at UCLA who was not involved in the
research.
The study captured a thin slice of Los Angeles's diversity,
including two black families, one Latino, one Japanese, and some ethnically
mixed couples, as well as two households with gay, male parents. The families
lived, most of them, well outside the city's tonier ZIP codes. After more than
$9 million and untold thousands of hours of video watching, they have found
that, well, life in these trenches is exactly what it looks like: a fire shower
of stress, multitasking and mutual nitpicking. And the researchers found plenty
to nitpick themselves. Mothers still do most of the housework, spending 27% of
their time on it, on average, compared with 18% for fathers and 3% for
children.
Husbands and wives were together alone in the house only
about 10% of their waking time and the entire family was gathered in one room
about 14% of the time. Stress levels soared — yet families spent very
little time in the most soothing, uncluttered area of the home, the
yard.
Occasionally, camera crews caught family members spitting into
a small vial. This, too, was a part of the study: Researchers measured levels of
a stress hormone called cortisol in the saliva, four times a day. These cortisol
profiles provided biological backing for a familiar frustration in many
marriages. The more that women engaged with their husbands in the evening,
talking about the day, the faster their cortisol dropped. But the men's levels
tapered more slowly when talking with a spouse.
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