Patterns of housework performance in the United States before, during, and after the Great Recession.

Housework is a key area of research across many academic fields as it represents the intersection of micro- and macro-level gender dynamics. Despite many shifts in both women's and men's economic activities, and men's changing gender beliefs, women remain largely responsible for the management and performance of domestic labor. Given the relationship between paid employment and household work, this research describes patterns of women's and men's housework before, during, and after the Great Recession. Using American Time Use Survey data, I perform latent profile analysis to document the distributions of housework tasks and time for women and men across these three time periods. While women perform the majority of housework across the time frame, women and men converge in their time during the Recession. Further, men's time becomes more varied and more similar to women's Post-Recession. The findings in this research brief highlight the connections between macro-level change and micro-level behavior.

How Early Life Religious Exposure Relates to the Timing of First Birth.

This paper examines intermediary processes explaining how religious socialization and involvement early in life are related to the timing of first births for women in the United States. The theory of conjunctural action forms the basis for hypotheses for how religious schema and materials operate to influence birth timing. Using the NLSY79 data and event history methods, the study finds evidence for expected family size, work-family gender ideology, educational attainment and enrollment, cohabitation, and age at marriage as mediators of associations between early life religious exposure (affiliation and attendance) and the timing of nonmaritally and maritally conceived first births. These findings corroborate other research identifying the long reach of religious socialization and involvement in youth, elucidate some of the pathways for these connections, and motivate further work to understand linkages between religion and family behaviors in the United States.

Feminists wrestle with testosterone: hormones, socialization and cultural interactionism as predictors of women's gendered selves.

Sociology of gender has developed beyond a personality-centered idea of "sex-roles" to an approach that stresses interaction and social structure. At the same time, there has been a concurrent development in the psychological sex-differences and medical literatures toward including the biological bases of sex-typed behavior and gender identities. In this paper, while we conceptualize gender as a social structure, we focus only on the individual level of analysis: testing the relative strength of (maternal circulating) prenatal hormones, childhood socialization, and the power of expectations attached to adult social roles (cultural interactionist) as explanations for women's self-reported feminine and masculine selves. Our findings are complex, and support some importance of each theory. Prenatal hormones, childhood socialization, and cultural interactionism were all influential factors for gendered selves. While cultural expectations predicted only feminine selves, prenatal hormones were more robust predictors of masculine sense of self. While personality may be a relatively stable characteristic influenced by the body and childhood socialization, our results reinforce the importance of studying how the social world responds to and reinforces gendered personality.

Racial/ethnic variations in the influence of parental attachment on adolescent substance abuse.

This article examines whether the influence of parental attachment on adolescent substance abuse differs by race/ethnicity. We hypothesized that the effect of parental attachment would be stronger for Asian Americans than for other adolescents. Using data from the 2005 Fairfax County Communities That Care survey (N = 7,589), we found no support for our hypothesis. Results suggest that the effect of parental attachment on self-reported substance abuse differs dramatically by the race/ethnicity of the adolescent. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed.