Intergenerational Caregiving (Urban Institute Press) - Softcover

Booth, Alan; Crouter, Ann C.; Bianchi, Susanne M.; Seltzer, Judith A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0877667470 ISBN 13: 9780877667476

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008

Synopsis

Dramatic changes in the American family have transformed the way we care for its oldest and youngest members. Nuclear families have become smaller as childbearing has declined, but extended families have become larger as life expectancy grows. Divorce, extramarital childbearing, cohabitation, and remarriage, have increased our number of kin but often complicate relationships and diffuse responsibility for care. In Intergenerational Caregiving, an interdisciplinary group of scholars considers our changing family relationships and their effect on social policies. Caregiving and its effects on families’ relationships and resources are examined from economic, sociological, anthropological and psychological perspectives, and chapters on both elders and children with disabilities are included.

About this title

About the Author:

Alan Booth is distinguished professor of sociology, human development, and demography at Penn State. He has been a senior scientist in Penn State s Population Research Institute since 1991. Booth has co-organized the University s National Symposium on Family Issues since its inception in 1993. His research has focused on marital and parent child relationship quality, nonresidential fathers and their children, adolescent transition to adulthood, as well as hormones and family relationships. He is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and four books, and editor of 16 volumes.

Ann C. Crouter is the Raymond E. and Erin Stuart Schultz Dean of the College of Health and Human Development and professor of human development at Penn State. Her research, funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, focuses on the interconnections between work circumstances and family processes in a variety of populations.

Suzanne M. Bianchi is professor and chair of sociology at the University of Maryland. She is a past president of the Population Association of America and a former director of the Maryland Population Research Center. Dr. Bianchi s research focuses on the American family, time use, and gender equality. Her most recent book (coauthored with John P. Robinson and Melissa Milkie), Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, is winner of the 2008 William Goode Book Award of the American Sociological Association. She was awarded the District of Columbia Sociological Society s 2008 Stuart A. Rice Award for Career Achievement.

Judith A. Seltzer is professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is chair-elect of the family section of the American Sociological Association and a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on the Design of the 2010 Census Program of Evaluations and Experiments. Seltzer studies kinship institutions that are in flux and instances in which family membership and coresidence do not coincide. Her research examines marriage, cohabitation, divorce, and nonmarital families in the United States. She has a long-standing interest in custody, child support, and visiting patterns in separated families and in the quality of data used to study families.

Review:

Fundamental demographic and economic change demands new family arrangements. This volume's contributors, from a range of social science disciplines, focus on exchanges both across and within generations―especially transfers of money, time, goods and services, and emotional support that affect the elderly population. This volume provides readers with the lay of the land in current research on generational ties; it is a must read for social scientists first exploring this terrain and for those who plan to alter this terrain with their subsequent research. ―S. Philip Morgan, professor of sociology and director of the Social Science Research Center, Duke University

A very useful compendium of what we know about intergenerational caregiving among American families and of what the issues are for the future. It is the best single collection of research and commentary on intergenerational relations that I have seen in recent years. I am sure I will be citing it in my own work. ―Andrew Cherlin, Griswold Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, and director, Hopkins Population Center, Johns Hopkins University

Intergenerational Caregiving contains thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes iconoclastic articles by key researchers on cutting-edge topics: What questions should we be asking? What theoretical perspectives might help? How do the answers differ internationally, by social or economic position, across families? But this book differs from others in including a dialogue between the authors, debating, critiquing, extending the arguments. Scholars in a number of fields, from human development to sociology to economics to psychology and beyond, will find it broadens their perspectives. ―Linda J. Waite, Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

About this edition

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0877667470
• ISBN 13: 9780877667476
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 420