Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life (CEEL)

a MiCDA Research Project Description

Investigators: Tom E. Fricke, Conrad Kottak, Frank P. Stafford, Arland Thornton

Funding: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

This interdisciplinary project examines cultural aspects of contemporary American life. In particular, CEEL's research and training activities focus on changes in family and work life among middle-class Americans over the past several decades, such as dramatic increases in married women's labor force participation, in the number of dual-career/dual-income families, and in the percentage of children under 5 years old in day care. CEEL's primary concern is with changes at the level of cultural and subjective meanings and their emotional reverberations in individual lives. The research agenda involves collecting a series of new data sets in the form of ethnographies of daily life initiated in communities and workplaces. To maximize the value of these data they are linked with thematically relevant quantitative data sets. About 25 researchers are associated with CEEL. Recent research projects include Fricke's "Rural Parents and Urban Children; Place, Work, Migration, and the Natal Home"; Hofferth's "The Time Crunch: Managing Home and Work in a Fast-Paced Society"; and Kottak's "The Relationship of Media to Work and Family Issues among the Middle Class."

Project Web Site: http://ceel.psc.isr.umich.edu/