Intergenerational Change in Families: the Effects of Immigration and Educational Mobility on Family Support and Values.

This study focuses on the effects of family attitudes, ideology and relations of a marked intergenerational difference in experience between parents and their offspring. The provision of mutual aid and psychological support is considered by many to be best provided by the family, as a group of related individuals with continuity of membership. Social change, however, is seen as a threat to the commonality of experience between the generations and thus to the integrity and availability of family supports. In this longitudinal study, 287 engaged couples were assessed between 1935-1939 and again in 1953-1954. The group is currently being assessed for another follow-up in 1982-1983. The independent variables defining intergenerational social change were the marker events of: (1) immigration (parental) and (2) discrepancy in educational level (subject's and father's levels) between the adjacent generations. The four dependent variable scales measured family values, traditional family ideology, relations with extended family and familial role performance. Group differences were examined using analysis of variance techniques. A second part of the study used Multiple Classification Analysis to develop an efficient intergenerational predictor of the family scales. Hypothesis I stated that the subjects whose experience was discrepant from that of their parents would score lower on the family scales. For the immigration difference hypothesis, only the results for Protestant and upper-class subjects on the measure of family values congruence supported the hypothesis. The educational discrepancy hypothesis was supported for the subjects aged 21-25 years (at Time 1). Hypothesis II was concerned with the development of an efficient intergenerationally-based measure of educational levels to use as a predictor of the family scales. This was accomplished only for the measure of traditional family ideology. The results were discussed in terms of the marginality vs. centrality of the immigrant groups, allegiance to familial vs. societal values where those appear to be different, and differential age effects which seemed to be associated with major historical events, especially the Great Depression. Areas for further study discussed include identifying cognitive mediators of the processes of social change in families and further exploration of the life-course effects of the Great Depression on this cohort in the 1982-1983 follow-up.PhDSocial psychologyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/158984/1/8224942.pd