Browsing by Subject "Family"

Background: South African adolescents living with HIV (ALWH) experience elevated risk for poor HIV-related outcomes due to challenges associated with HIV disease management. While previous research suggests that social support may mitigate poor HIV-related outcomes, we know little about the specific types of family social support that help ALWH achieve better health outcomes or how this support might be better facilitated. This study aimed to address this gap by characterizing the types of social support provided by family members to assist ALWH in their HIV care management.Methods: We conducted fifty-nine in-depth, semi-structured interviews with ALWH (n=20), their caregivers (n=19), and community stakeholders (n=20) in Cape Town, South Africa. Using deductive and then inductive thematic methods, we triangulated data from these three groups in NVivo to qualitatively analyze family social support. Results: We identified four types of family social support: instrumental support, appraisal support, emotional support, and informational support. Families provided crucial instrumental support through treatment reminders and attending clinic appointments with ALWH. Families also acted as strong sources of appraisal support to help ALWH reflect upon the importance of medication adherence by promoting future orientation and HIV normalization. Similarly, families facilitated adherence through emotional support, such as motivating ALWH and demonstrating interest in their health. Lastly, families offered informational assistance to educate adolescents about managing HIV treatment challenges, such as side effects. Conclusion: In characterizing family social support, our findings highlight sources of struggle and possible solutions to the challenges that ALWH face in their HIV care. Our results suggest that ALWH and providers rely heavily on families to distribute these four types of support in HIV care, emphasizing the importance of exploring how to better facilitate and replicate this support. Understanding these types of social support is a crucial step to identifying potential gaps in care and possible intervention strategies. As such, future research should inquire about the efficacy of incorporating these types of social support into interventions to assist ALWH in their HIV care management.

American family relations are formally defined through marriage and descent but these formal distinctions are inadequate to capture the diversity of contemporary family life. Recent demographic trends have led to a diversification of family structures. Alternative, and less institutionalized ties like co-residence and informal partnerships bind an increasing number of families. Clearly defined cultural models do not yet exist for these new relationships. During these demographic changes the cultural dominance of the single breadwinner model has been challenged by women's mass entry into the labor market. New models of fatherhood have begun to emerge and conventional parenting roles may be carried out in diverse ways. A new method is needed to capture the relational processes of new family forms and the heterogeneity of conventional ones.

I argue families' formal structures can be classified by the things their members do, and the time they share with each other. Network methods sort family structures into discrete types that capture differences in lived experiences. The distinctions differentiating family structures from each another reveal meaningful information about how families are organized in the contemporary context. The four substantive papers in this dissertation each contribute a different demonstration of this fundamental argument.

First, the method is developed in a familiar context, using conventional distinctions embedded in kinship terms to move one step beyond traditional analyses of the family. Traditional categorical approaches enumerate traditionally defined relationships. We ask instead how patterns of consanguinity and marriage actually combine in American households, making no assumptions about the importance of any particular relation or individual attribute.

The three papers that follow are further from the traditional categorical approach. I don't assume that descent and marriage are necessary elements of family relationships. Instead, relationship types are defined by patterns of activities that children do with their potential kin. I apply the method to three waves of time use diaries from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Children's relationships with both traditional and new kin types are heterogeneous, yet structured. Next I develop and test a predictive model of parent-child relationships. The results show that allowing salient relationship features to emerge from time use data is fundamental to understanding how parent-child relationships differ by parents' attributes and household characteristics.

Finally, I examine how relationship types cohere into families. Children have the same type of family when their families are composed of a similar set of relationship types. The relations within most family types are qualitatively similar to each other - if one relationship is broad (or perfunctory) the others are likely to be as well.

Since the 2011 meltdown, the health of “Fukushima children” has become a problem for parents, politics, and future imaginaries in post-nuclear Japan. What are the ethical and political implications of making life around a child imperiled by radiation when (re)productivity of life must be remade in a compromised environment? This dissertation investigates (re)production of life in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan by studying the strivings of families who seek to raise healthy children amidst radiation as a condition of living: what I call “anxious care.” By foregrounding the family as a site for environmental struggles in an emerging politics of life, I examine the work of making children live against and within radiation, looking to consider the radical implications of caring for children in radioactive uncertainty. In particular, this project focuses on inner cities of Fukushima Prefecture that have been on the frontline of radiation debates for having been exposed to disaster-induced radiation while not designated for evacuation. Shifting focus to the edges of delimited disaster zones, I examine the multifaceted aftermath of the nuclear disaster, ranging from differentially altered forms of life conditioned by radioactive uncertainty, the unequal distribution of radiation risk through public/private organizations such as the family form, and the everyday impact of post-Fukushima radiation. Theorizing the stakes of living with nuclear risk as situated political ecologies which generates tensions and possibilities for new forms of life, this dissertation argues that notions of life are undergoing a moment of reconfiguration in post-nuclear Japan by both real-life families and the family form. In doing so, it contributes to critiquing and broadening the anthropological horizons of life amid environmental uncertainty in and beyond Japan.

Scholars over the past several decades have noted the resilience of religion in the United States (Chaves 2011; Gorski and Altınordu 2008; Hadden 1987:601–2; Presser and Chaves 2007), but many recognize that the youngest US cohorts are significantly lower on several religious characteristics than older cohorts (Hout and Fischer 2014; Putnam and Campbell 2012; Voas and Chaves 2016). Scholars have proposed several explanations for this trend, disagreeing about whether it is the result of a particular cultural moment or an ongoing process leading to even greater religious decline. Replicating Voas’ (2009) model of slow, predictable decline across cohorts, I find that, surprisingly, the US closely fits the same trajectory of religious decline as European countries, suggesting a shared demographic process as opposed to idiosyncratic change. Family dynamics are an important part of this story. Family characteristics are some of the most significant predictors of religious outcomes (Hoge, Petrillo, and Smith 1982; Smith and Denton 2005; Uecker and Ellison 2012), but only a few studies have examined how aggregate religious decline is shaped by family processes (Chaves 1991; Crockett and Voas 2006; Kelley and De Graaf 1997). Even fewer have done so using self-reported data from members of several generations of the same families (Bengtson et al. 2018; Bengtson, Putney, and Harris 2013; Smith and Denton 2005). I advance this line of research by decomposing within-family, inter-generational religious decline into components that can be attributed to factors within the family and those that cannot. Whereas the combination of individual and family characteristics explains the decline in religious service attendance within families, it does not explain much of the decline in self-rated religiosity, suggesting that the intergenerational transmission of religious behavior operates differently than the intergenerational transmission of internal sense of religiosity. I consider these findings in light of theory and research by developmental psychologists and sociologists of the family on what leads children to adopt (or not) their parents’ values, attitudes, and practices.

“Cultures of Emotion: Families, Friends, and the Making of the United States” explores the centrality of families to the new republic’s economy and governing institutions in the post-Revolutionary period. In so doing, my work brings the insights of scholarship on the early modern period to the post-Revolutionary United States, where the literature has tended to focus on men and women as individuals, rather than understanding them as members of far-flung family networks. While focusing specifically on several prominent families based in North Carolina and Virginia, the dissertation shows that during this period, wealthy elites during this period had extensive interests in their states and the federal government. They identified so closely with these bodies that they collapsed their interests with the public interest and used their access to them to advance their families’ interests in the name of the public good. By folding the institutions of federal and state government into their family networks, the new republic’s elites organized their own lives and these developing institutions around the metaphor and idea of family. As this dissertation argues, these dynamics were built into the institutional structure of the new nation, creating a governing system intertwined with the familial networks of the elite.

The focus is on two elite families: the Coles of Virginia and the Camerons of North Carolina. Both families were prominent members of the southern elite with networks centered in the South that extended throughout the country and stretched across the Atlantic. Members of both networks held prominent positions in state and national government, and both networks had extensive and varied business interests.

This dissertation combines the history of the Atlantic World with women’s, women’s, economic, political, and legal history to explore the economic and political implications of the connections between the “private,” domestic world of the family and the “public” world of governance at the federal, state, and local levels. The focus on family and affective labor, combined with the contributions of recent work in legal history, recasts our understanding of economic and political development in this period. Examining the intersections of politics with family business networks in the antebellum United States reveals the limitations of the power of governing institutions, particularly at the state and federal level, and the interdependent relationship between elite family networks and government. Government was not a unified, monopolizing force. Rather, governing authority lay in different arenas—at the local, state, and federal levels, and elite families used their networks to access government at these levels to support their economic interests.

“Cultures of Emotion” uses affective labor as a lens through which to examine a unique blend of sources: personal, business, and political correspondence, as well as ledgers, bonds, and other business and political documents. The personal correspondence allows me to reconstruct the basic outlines of kinship networks by revealing the work that men and women did in creating and maintaining familial ties through performances of specific emotional norms. The personal, business, and political correspondence of women and men in the families I study reveals repeated elements in correspondence that served as performances of emotional kinship bonds, as well as conventions to follow. Following the connections established in this correspondence to the ledgers, bonds, and other statements of credit and debt between the network’s members uncovers the webs of credit and debt that sustained elite families. These business and political records underscore the importance of kinship in maintaining these webs of credit and debt and constitute an important link in understanding the way the network’s political and economic power rested on familial bonds and incorporated the institutions of state and federal government as a member, firmly situating the economic and political networks in the domestic realm. Such an approach recasts our understanding of the nineteenth-century United States, centering families in the work of governance and highlighting women’s central role in their families’ economic and political work.

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This dissertation examines racial socialization in Afro-Brazilian families in order to understand how phenotypically diverse families negotiate racial hierarchies and ideologies of white supremacy. As an inductive, qualitative project, this research is based on over fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil in fifteen poor and working-class Bahian families and 116 semi-structured interviews with family members and informants. Findings suggest that one of the most prominent features of racial socialization is the pervasive devaluation of black/African influences, which is conveyed through implicit and explicit messages as well as concrete practices (including rituals) that promote the stigmatization of negatively valued racialized physical features. The study reveals a pattern of unequal distribution of affection based on racial appearance (phenotype), which is evident in parent-child, sibling, extended family, and romantic relationships. Findings suggest that negative appraisals of racial phenotype may significantly compromise affective bonds in families and have social psychological consequences impacting self-esteem and sense of belonging, while also eliciting suicidal ideations and anxieties. These outcomes are most pronounced for Afro-Brazilian females. Racial socialization also conveys the "strategically ambiguous" logic of color and racial classification, uncritically exposes family members to racist messages, jokes, and stereotypical images of Afro-Brazilians, and encourages cultural participation that superficially valorizes Afro-Brazilian culture and fosters nationalism, rather than racial identity. In contrast to traditional findings of racial socialization in the U.S., messages valorizing racial heritage are rare and efforts to prepare family members for bias rely on universal terms. Families do employ counter-discourses and creative strategies of resistance; and so, racial socialization is characterized by practices that reflect both resistance and accommodation to racial hierarchies. I conclude that racial socialization in families is influenced by and sustains racialization processes that maintain the broader system of white supremacy. Contrary to how racial socialization has been framed as having a purely protective role in families, this study illustrates how it may disadvantage blacks vis-à-vis whites and uniquely stigmatizes the most "black-looking" family members vis-à-vis those who more closely approximate an idealized (whiter) somatic norm. Future studies should triangulate data on racial socialization from other regions of the Americas.

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