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CAROL WORTHMAN Project title: "Rituals of the Body: Stress and Everyday Life"
The aim of this proposed research is to trace the pathways from social structure through culture and meaning, to differential well-being. It bypasses the well-recognized, formidable relationship between poverty and distress, to ask why, in the face of unparalleled affluence and opportunity, the American middle-class family struggles with the shadows of [relative] deprivation, insecurity, and everyday incoherence. We seek to build a biocultural model of embodied stress and differential well-being, based on an approach that deploys two important but still evolving approaches to biology and to culture. The first uses the body as a lens through which to study the action and production of different lived experiential worlds. This approach builds on psychobiological models of stress, affective regulation, and reactivity. The second uses individual beliefs, values and behavior (practices, relationships) to examine the construction and evaluation of local, personal and interpersonal meaning, particularly in relation to relative social status. This approach deploys the concepts and analytic techniques of cultural consensus modeling, status incongruity, and cultural models and schema analysis. Our working model concerns linkages of cultural models of middle-class status to specific practices and lifestyle choices (routines and rituals) that, conjointly with internalized schemas, shape psychobiological states that represent embodied meaning and reflect physiologic processes constituting the bases of health and well-being. On the empirical front, the research will proceed in several steps. First, issues of scheduling and time management will be related to measures of family functioning and child well-being in our existing extensive North Carolina datasets. Second and concurrent with the first step, we will work here in Atlanta to formulate, collect and refine interviews on cultural models, cultural consensus and competence, and status incongruity with respect to notions of social status and middle-classness, of family, and of success. Third, based on the key themes and variables identified by the rich body of data generated on North Carolina, along with those from cultural epidemiology, we will formulate the next wave of research, which will attempt to relate our cultural epidemiologic framework to our physiologic and psychobiologic measures of stress and affect regulation. Initially, the approach would be a rather simplified one which addresses questions like whether the absence of routine, cultural congruence, or lifestyle congruity is associated with increased chronic stress, stress vulnerability, and compromised cognitive-emotional regulation. We propose to take advantage of these existing data and blood samples to explore relationships among scheduling complexity, family function, and child well-being. The interviews will provide important information about the range of family schedules in these populations, information about people's daily lives that will crucially inform further research--certainly our own and possibly that of Center members. More narrowly and specifically, we can also address the following hypotheses:
Factors Affecting Family Schedules 1. Parent labor (type of work, number of jobs, and the "goodness of fit" of jobs in the dual income household) represents a major scheduling constraint for families. 2. Parent income can significantly moderate the impact of labor scheduling constraints (by allowing the hiring of services, or provision of reliable infrastructure). 3. Where parents work long hours or take on additional jobs in order to achieve income goals, family scheduling may become especially difficult. Where high job burden converges with economic difficulty (inability to hire services, poor infrastructure), schedules can become chaotic. 4. Child schooling and extracurricular activity can contribute largely to family scheduling complexity, although this varies with age of children. Central to our model is the hypothesis that lifestyle and status are to a large degree embodied, and that this embodied quality emerges from the practices, relationships, and motivational-evaluative psychodynamics entailed in producing (earning and enacting) a meaningful life. Pursuit of social goals that embed potential conflict among them leads to the popular distinction of "making a living" versus "having a life" in the project of "making a life." Hence, we are using status and lifestyle as foci for investigation in order to work our way through complex, tangled issues while attempting to construct new ways to do anthropology, using a biocultural approach. Part of this project is to unpack the place of ritual in contemporary middle-class American families by entertaining a wide spectrum of practices that may experientially constitute ritual of various grades. We assume that ritual is as necessary to human functioning as eating or sleeping is: it will happen in some form in any life experienced as meaningful and worth living. Working with our colleagues in the Center as well, we will explore this domain and try to identify hallmarks and arenas for ritual practices, from personal and interpersonal routines, through formalized public enactments. Besides performances, objects and faces can serve iconic functions, personal or shared, and their presence or contemplation (however brief, and even through internal representation) can constitute significant ritual. To this end, we will use a range of exploratory techniques, including the following: 1. giving individual family members single-use cameras and cassette recorders to record settings and moments of their daily lives that they would want to represent them at their best, versus them at their usual. Another approach is to ask them to represent the best in their lives, the worst in their lives, and the banal/usual/routine in their lives; 2. use the same recording techniques to elicit settings, activities, people, or objects that they feel best represent or denote their lifestyle (or status, or values); 3. describe a really bad day and an especially good day, and how such a day makes them feel (i.e., how do you know how things are going?) [unstructured taped interview]; 4. consider what makes a day, a life worthwhile; what gets them through the day [unstructured, taped interview]; semistructured interview about daily routines, how they are established and maintained, and what aspects are problematic or stressful, and which are reassuring, relaxing, or satisfying [amazingly, many seem to find a solitary commute of some duration relaxing or restabilizing in an embodied way that effects the home/work domain shift]; 5. use a digital camera to document social dynamics, settings, practices, and facial expressions [using a digital camera allows for the necessary excessive photographing with subsequent pruning to most legible, representative images]. Once we have worked through the above agenda, a process likely to take nearly two years, the elements will be in place to formulate and carry out biocultural research that directly engages our problem. This work will presumably center in the MARIAL research sites and focus on a set of families drawn to represent variation on key dimensions (possibilities include age of children, nature of parental occupations). Again, we will concentrate on habitual practices that influence sense of well-being, particularly daily schedules (including mealtimes, morning routines, exercise, bedtimes and sleeping practices) that may constitute embodied rituals. And we will obtain cultural epidemiological data from cultural consensus modeling, measures of status or lifestyle incongruity and uncertainty, perceived control, and self-report about schemas of production (earning and enacting) of social status, including rituals of consumption and of social cohesion. Unlike any previous work in this area, we will collect such data from each family member to test for correlates of consonance and dissonance in these domains. Additionally, and again uniquely, we will collect measures of acute stress (cortisol), chronic stress (EBV AB), reactivity and state regulation (cortisol and cardiovascular responses to a naturalistic social challenge) from each family member using scheduled self-sampling and structured interview techniques.
"Cultural Consensus
Approaches to the Study of American Family Life" |