American Family Imagery in 1957 and 1976: from Conformity to Complexity.

Abstract

Americans have long been invested in both the idea and fact of "family." As fact, family life is one of the most complex, emotionally-laden, and important realms of society. As a symbol, the idea of family generates, on a collective and individual level, idealism, optimism, warmth, worry and hope. As a symbol, also, it is subject to study and research, as we seek to underst and how Americans think about family and particularly how conceptions and perceptions of family have changed over time. Using projective data collected from a nationally representative sample of over 1,000 male and female adult Americans, in 1957 and again in 1976, the research investigated the predominant family images found in a set of eleven thematic apperceptive stories and analyzed changes in the salience of these images over the twenty year period. An extensive coding of story activities, affects, needs, characters, outcome, family themes and numerous other story details was employed to track the ebb and flow of major ideas about family. Reliability of the coding was higher than 90% agreement and analyses of the data revealed that the measures of family salience and ideation were sufficiently valid. Twenty dimensions or composites of American family imagery were discovered through the techniques of data analysis used. Predominant among these were themes of a cognitive or teaching parenting style, parent-child conflict, ambiguity and uncertainty in marriage, parenting, and work-family roles, and nurturance and provision for family members. Parenting imagery was found to have significantly changed in emphases from 1957 to 1976, while marriage imagery was stable both in content and degree of appearance. More prevalent in 1957 were images relevant to parents as teachers and children as passive learners, while in 1976 there was a higher concentration on parent-child affect and conflict in the family. In general, there appears to be more stability in reference to most family images across the twenty year period than there is change. The significance of these results lies in their apparent suggestion that Americans are thinking of family in a less idealistic, conformist sense, that their images of family have incorporated the notion of family conflict, children as initiators of interaction and feeling, and parents as reactors and facilitators, rather than primarily authoritarian advisors. While there is in 1976 a significantly higher reference to ambiguity and uncertainty in family imagery, which may indicate a continuing process of transition and search for definition, there is no sign that American family imagery is suffering from a decline in the salience to Americans of family relatedness. The implications of these results to social work education and practice were discussed.