24. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Study surveys, predicting civic engagement from work status among single moms, controlling for all standard demographic variables.
25. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style surveys and the Americans’ Use of Time archive. Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality, 259, find that men are more active in politics and women more active in religious institutions; they find no gender difference in secular, nonpolitical participation.
26. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style surveys. The generalizations in this paragraph refer to the net effect of full-time work, controlling for education, race, financial worries, residential mobility, marital and parental status, year of birth, and year of survey. This same pattern appears in the Americans’ Use of Time archive, as reported by Laura Tiehen, “Has Working Caused Married Women to Volunteer Less? Evidence from Time Diary Data 1965 to 1993,” paper delivered at the 28th Annual Conference of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA), Washington, D.C., November 4–6, 1999. In the Roper Social and Political Trends data, too, husbands of full-time employees attend church less frequently, holding other demographic factors constant.
27. Author’s analysis of General Social Survey (membership in school service organizations), DDB Needham Life Style surveys (for club attendance), and Americans’ Use of Time archive (for time allocation).
28. The full question is: “In today’s society, many women work at home as full-time homemakers, and many women work and are paid for jobs outside the home. Other women combine both worlds by working part-time. Which of the alternatives below best describes what you do, along with the main reason behind your choice? (1) Full time homemaker, because I get personal satisfaction from being a homemaker and do not care to work outside my home; (2) Full-time homemaker, because I feel I should be at home to take better care of my children, even though I would like to work; (3) Employed part-time, because I get personal satisfaction from working at least some time outside my home; (4) Employed part-time, because the money I earn at my part-time job helps out with the family finances; (5) Employed full-time because I get personal satisfaction from my job; (6) Employed full-time, because the income I earn contributes to the family finances.” As noted in appendix I, the DDB Needham Life Style surveys did not include single respondents prior to 1985. To extend our analysis of trends back to 1978, I imputed the distribution of work status and preferences for single women between 1978 and 1984, on the basis of observed trends for single women in 1985–99. No conclusion in the text would be altered, however, if we limited our analysis to 1985–99, although the degree of change in women’s work status would be truncated.
29. This finding is confirmed by the Roper finding that “the proportion of [all] women who say they would rather stay home than go to work stood at 53 percent in 1992, up from 43 percent in 1985, a reversal of the downward trend in this statistic since the early 1970s.” Russell, Master Trend, 65. Caution is necessary in assessing the details of figure 48, given the special character of the DDB Needham Life Style sample described in appendix I. I have no reason to doubt the pattern in figure 48, but I have found no other archives that contain the overtime information on women’s work preferences necessary to confirm it.
30. Columns in figure 49 represent unstandardized OLS regression coefficients for dummy variables representing the various female work status, controlling for education, year of birth, year of survey, marital and parental status, financial worries, and expected future mobility. Absent financial worries, low income has no net effect on civic engagement.
31. The same pattern appears in the General Social Survey; in Nicholas Zill, “Family Change and Student Achievement: What We Have Learned, What It Means for Schools,” in Family-School Links: How Do They Affect Educational Outcomes?, eds. Alan Booth and Judith Dunn (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996), 23; and in Marc Musick and John Wilson, “Women’s Labor Force Participation and Volunteer Work,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (Washington, D.C.: 1999).
32. These estimates control for education, age, financial security, and marital and parental status.
33. Women who choose to work (whether full-time or part-time) are even less likely to attend church than those who work out of necessity. Self-selection may be relevant in this case, in the sense that women who are highly observant religiously may be more likely to choose a traditional family role.
34. I explored possible interactions among work, parental, and marital status in affecting women’s social interaction. Except among single moms, as discussed above, full-time work inhibits social connectedness, whatever the woman’s marital and parental status.
35. Multivariate analysis of the DDB Needham data suggests that women who are not employed full-time invest their additional free time in civic activities, whereas men who are working part-time do not.
36. Author’s analysis of data from the General Social Survey. My previous work drew exclusively on the GSS measure of formal membership and was therefore led to the guess—firmly contradicted by the more abundant evidence now available—that full-time employment might not impede women’s social participation. See my “Tuning In, Tuning Out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America,” PS: Political Science and Politics 28 (December 1995): 664–683; and “The Strange Disappearance of Civic America,” The American Prospect, winter 1996, 34–48.
37. My back-of-the-envelope estimate of the effects of women’s entry into the labor force is this: The largest difference in club attendance is between homemakers by choice and full-time workers by necessity—2 meetings annually. Between 1978 and 1999, according to our data, roughly one person in ten (net) moved from the most “club-friendly” to the least “club-friendly” category. Thus if no women had moved into the workplace over this period, that might have “saved” .2 club meetings per adult annually, whereas the actual decline over these same years (as shown in chapter 3) was roughly 5 meetings per year. Comparable calculations for other forms of civic engagement converge on a rough estimate that 10 percent of the total drop might be linked to this factor. This calculation ignores the effect of a wife’s work on her husband’s civic activity, but that effect is small in the aggregate. These individual correlations between work status and engagement disregard synergistic effects of women entering the labor force—if, for example, the fact that some women took a job also cut club-going among those who stayed home.
38. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style and Roper Social and Political Trends archives. Affluence in the DDB Needham Life Style analysis was defined as the lowest quartile of financial anxiety. Over these two decades the number of affluent housewives fell by two-thirds to only 8 percent of working-age women. Affluence in the Roper Social and Political Trends analysis (absent a direct measure of financial anxiety) was defined as the highest quartile of income.
39. The effects of women working and financial worries discussed in this chapter cannot simply be added together, since the two factors themselves overlap, as we have seen. My best guess is that together they account for roughly one-tenth of the total decline in social connectedness.
CHAPTER 12: MOBILITY AND SPRAWL
1. Sally Ann Shumaker and Daniel Stokols, “Residential Mobility as a Social Issue and Research Topic,” Journal of Social Issues 38 (1982): 1–19, and author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style surveys.
2. J. Miller McPherson and William G. Lockwood, “The Longitudinal Study of Voluntary Association Memberships: A Multivariate Analysis,” Journal of Voluntary Action Research 9 (January/December 1980): 74–84; Wolfinger and Rosenstone, Who Votes?, esp. 50–54; Robert J. Sampson, “Linking the Micro- and Macrolevel Dimensions of Community Social Organization,” Social Forces 70 (September 1991): 43–64; Sampson, “Local Friendship Ties”; Steven J. Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America, esp. 15
7–58; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality, 452–455; Johanne Boisjoly, Greg J. Duncan, and Sandra Hofferth, “Access to Social Capital,” Journal of Family Issues 16 (September 1995): 609–631; Hausknecht, Joiners, 47–48; author’s analysis of the DDB Needham Life Style surveys, controlling for standard demographic factors, including age, sex, race, education, income, and marital, parental, and employment status.
3. Sampson, “Local Friendship Ties”; Robert D. Crutchfield, Michael R. Geerken, and Walter R. Gove, “Crime Rate and Social Integration: The Impact of Metropolitan Mobility,” Criminology 20 (November 1982): 467–478; Robert Audette, Robert Algozzine, and Michelle Warden, “Mobility and School Achievement,” Psychological Reports 72 (April 1993): 701–702; John Eckenrode, Elizabeth Rowe, Molly Laird, and Jacqueline Brathwaite, “Mobility as a Mediator of the Effects of Child Maltreatment on Academic Performance,” Child Development 66 (August 1995): 1130–1142; and John Hagan, Ross MacMillan, and Blair Wheaton, “New Kid in Town: Social Capital and the Life Course Effects of Family Migration on Children,” American Sociological Review 61 (June 1996): 368–385. For counterevidence, see Peter H. Rossi, Why Families Move (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1980); and Fischer, Jackson, et al., Networks and Places, 177–184.
4. Larry E. Long, Migration and Residential Mobility in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988); Shumaker and Stokols, “Residential Mobility”; Historical Statistics of the United States I: 646; Statistical Abstract of the United States 1998; U.S. Census Bureau, “Housing Vacancies and Homeownership,” at www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/hvs/historic/histt14.html; Fischer, Jackson, et al., Networks and Places, 191–192; author’s analysis of National Election Study and DDB Needham Life Style surveys. One recent study suggests that mobility in the second half of the twentieth century may have been higher than in the period between 1860 and 1920, but this study, too, finds lower mobility in 1960–90 than in 1940–60; see Patricia Kelly Hall and Steven Ruggles, “Moving Through Time: Internal Migration Patterns of Americans, 1850–1990,” paper presented at the Social Science History Association meetings (Fort Worth, Tex.: November 1999). Although the average American has been in the same locality for more than two decades, we change residences about every 5 years—renters every 2.1 years, homeowners every 8.2 years; Randolph E. Schmid, “Americans Move about Every 5 Years,” Associated Press, October 29, 1998, citing Census Bureau study. One possible exception to declining mobility is that younger single people may be slightly more mobile now than their counterparts were several decades ago, but this trend is much too limited to account for the aggregate decline in social connectedness. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style surveys; Matthew Klein, “Where America Lives,” American Demographics, January 1998, citing National Association of Home Builders.
5. Author’s analysis of DDB Needham Life Style, Roper Social and Political Trends, and General Social Survey archives, controlling for education, age, race, income, marital status, and residential stability. Residents of big cities and their suburbs are less likely to engage in every one of the dozen civic activities measured in the Roper Social and Political Trends surveys, especially running for office, serving as an officer or committee member of a local organization, attending a public meeting, and making a speech. See also John Eric Oliver, Civil Society in Suburbia: The Effects of Metropolitan Social Contexts on Participation in Voluntary Organizations (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1997), esp. 64, and Hausknecht, Joiners, 18–21.
6. This pattern appears for virtually all of the dozens of indicators of civic involvement in both the DDB Needham Life Style and the Roper Social and Political Trends data, controlling for all standard demographic variables. The exact categorization of city size differs between the two archives, as indicated in figure 50 and figure 51, but in both archives at each step up in size from rural areas to major metropolitan areas civic engagement decreases.
7. The DDB Needham Life Style survey includes questions about where the respondent would prefer to live— big city or small town, city or suburb. When actual location and preferred location are both included in multiple regression analysis of social participation measures, actual location is always significant and preferred location rarely so.
8. John D. Kasarda, Stephen J. Appold, Stuart H. Sweeney, and Elaine Sieff, “Central-City and Suburban Migration Patterns: Is a Turnaround on the Horizon?” Housing Policy Debate 8 (1997): 307–358.
9. Mark Twain (1867) quoted in Bayrd Still, Urban America: A History with Documents (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 198; Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1884) excerpted in City and Country in America, ed. David R. Weimer (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962), 60.
10. The Roper Social and Political Trends surveys hint at a civic “boom and bust” cycle in small towns and rural areas in the late 1980s, a pattern that blurs the secular trend downward in those settings, but this pattern does not appear in the DDB Needham Life Style, General Social Survey, or National Election Study surveys, so it is most likely a statistical fluke.
11. Ad for Park Forest Homes, Inc., November 8, 1952, quoted in William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956), 284.
12. Whyte, Organization Man, quotation at 287; Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967); Claude S. Fischer and Robert Max Jackson, “Suburbanism and Localism,” in Fischer et al., Networks and Places, 117–138; Seeley, Sim, and Loosley, Crestwood Heights. By contrast, Bennett M. Berger, Working Class Suburb: A study of Autoworkers in Suburbia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), and Basil G. Zimmer and Amos H. Hawley, “The Significance of Membership in Associations,” American Journal of Sociology 65 (September 1959): 196–201, found little or no unusual community involvement in early postwar suburbs.
13. Peter O. Muller, Contemporary Suburban America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981); Gregory R. Weiher, The Fractured Metropolis: Political Fragmentation and Metropolitan Segregation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); Douglas Massey and Mitchell Eggers, “The Spatial Concentration of Affluence and Poverty During the 1970s,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 29 (December 1993): 299–315; Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994); and Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1997). McKenzie reports that homeowners associations nationwide mushroomed from 10,000 in 1970 to 150,000 in 1992, representing 32 million Americans.
14. www.concordhomes.com/co/co_greenfield.html. Ironically, Greenfield is only a few miles from Whyte’s Park Forest.
15. Blakely and Snyder, Fortress America; J. Eric Oliver, “The Effects of Metropolitan Economic Segregation on Local Civic Participation,” American Journal of Political Science 43 (January 1999): 186–212, quotation at 205. Serious research on gated communities is in its infancy.
16. M. P. Baumgartner, The Moral Order of a Suburb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Duany and Plater-Zyberk, quoted in William Schneider, “The Suburban Century Begins,”The Atlantic Monthly, July 1992, 33–44, at 37.
17. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), 412; Robert E. Lang and Karen A. Danielsen, “Gated Communities in America: Walling Out the World?”Housing Policy Debate 8 (1997): 873
18. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), quotation at 272, 279–80.
19. Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Anchor Books, 1991); James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, ed. Peter Katz (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994); Thomas
W. Hanchett, “U.S. Tax Policy and the Shopping Center Boom of the 1950s and 1960s,” American Historical Review 101 (October 1996): 1082–1110; Kenneth T. Jackson, “All the World’s a Mall: Reflections on the Social and Economic Consequences of the American Shopping Center,” American Historical Review (October 1996): 1111–1121; Margaret Crawford, “The World in a Shopping Mall,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, Michael Sorkin, ed. (New York: Noonday Press, 1992); Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 265.
20. Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1998, 636; The Public Perspective 10 (February/March 1999): 26; Brad Edmondson, “In the Driver’s Seat,” American Demographics, March 1998, at www.americandemographics.com; and National Association of Home Builders from Census data, at www.nahb.com/facts/forecast/sf.html (consulted January 27, 2000).
21. Data in this and the previous two paragraphs from Patricia S. Hu and Jennifer R. Young, “Summary of Travel Trends: 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey,” prepared for U.S. Department of Transportation (Oak Ridge, Tenn.: Center for Transportation Analysis, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, January 1999), www.cta.ornl.gov/npts/1995/Doc/trends_report18.pdf, 1995 data adjusted for comparability with earlier surveys; Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1998, 636; Our Nation’s Travel: 1995 National Personal Transportation Survey Early Results Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Transportation, 1998), “Work at Home in 1997,” a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://stats.bls.gov/news.release/homey.nws.htm; William G. Deming, “Work at Home: Data from the CPS,” Monthly Labor Review (February 1994): 14–20; Patricia L. Mokhtarian and Dennis K. Henderson, “Analyzing the Travel Behavior of Home-Based Workers in the 1991 CALTRANS Statewide Travel Survey,” Journal of Transportation and Statistics (October 1998): 25–41; David Schrank and Tim Lomax, The 1999 Annual Urban Mobility Study (College Station: Texas Transportation Institute, Texas A&M University, 1999), at http://mobility.tamu.edu/. Our Nation’s Travel estimates solo commuting at 80 percent in 1995; Gallup (www.gallup.com) estimates it at 90 percent in December 1998. Other data on commuting time converge on an estimate of twenty minutes each way, rising over time. These include the decennial census (1980–90), the Roper Social and Political Trends surveys (1973–98), and the Americans’ Use of Time studies (1965–85). Roper Reports 98–3 (New York: Roper Starch Worldwide, 1998), 150, which provides the longest, most up-to-date time series, suggests that even accounting for home-based work, employees who commute more than twenty minutes rose from 29 percent in 1973 to 38 percent in 1999. Report on the American Workforce 1999, 117, shows that the share of the workforce who did any work at home, including self-employment or taking work home at night, slipped from 18.3 percent in 1991 to 17.7 percent in 1997.
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