queerbychoice | Feminist Research Requested

Can anyone provide me with a critique of these statistics? I find them suspicious-sounding but I have no actual proof at the moment of whether anything's fishy about them:

Yet according to the Families and Work Institute in New York City, fathers now provide three-fourths of the child care mothers do, up from one-half 30 years ago. . . . According to a 2002 survey conducted by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR), the world's largest academic survey and research organization, men are doing at least as much overall household work as women. Women do an average of 27 hours of housework a week, compared to 16 hours a week for men. Balanced against this, however, is the study's less-publicized finding that the average man spends 14 hours a week more on the job than the average woman. Thus men's overall contribution to the household is actually slightly higher than women's.

The quote comes from this article, which begins by stating that "It's one thing to be respectful of gays and gay parents. It's quite another to engineer a deceptive study and use it to assert that lesbian families are a better environment in which to raise boys than heterosexual families.". . . And then it goes on to assert, instead, that heterosexual families are a better environment in which to raise boys, and in the process engineers a deceptive article that completely loses sight of its original supposed goal of being respectful of "gays and gay parents" (unless wait, maybe the only goal the author considered worthy was respecting gay male parents, in which case he neglected to discuss them at all because he was too busy stereotyping lesbians as man-haters to have any time left for mentioning gay males). In short, it was a really annoying article, but I had no trouble at all mentally demolishing the author's arguments in all cases other than those statistics he gave. For demolishing those statistics, I'd like to know if the rest of you can help me.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This article appears to reference the same study on men and housework:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-06/uoc--wdc061003.php

ISR doesn't seem to put all of their reports online, but the report can probably be requested pretty easily:

"Contact the Research Design and Development Unit for help locating studies on topics of interest. The unit staff can be reached at 734-222-8998 or by email at isr-web-inquiry@isr.umich.edu."

If they won't do it for you, they might do it for my favorite Anthro professor.

Here is the website for the Child Development Supplement to the study they appear to be citing. I have NO IDEA how to navigate this, though. It doesn't seem to like Mozilla. http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/CDS/cdsguide.html

Be sure, also, to see if you can find exactly how many and what sort of people were surveyed for the study--and if the initial study had any significant conflicts of interest. Statistics are by nature rather tricky.

That said, I'd like to get in on one of these. I want to have been raised by lesbians!

I want you to have been raised by lesbians too. In fact, if I ever get my hands on a time machine and enough money to raise children, I'm going to use it to go kidnap you shortly after birth and raise you myself.

That's actually one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me. Thank you.

I think you would be the best half of the best pair of moms ever. I wouldn't cost much to raise. I don't eat a lot and don't take up too much space. ;)

Beware the average.

Beware the fact that this lumps all men and all women into one category. No breakdown of single/married, single/dual-income households, etc.

Oh yeah, time diaries were only used up to 1985. After that they rely on self-reports on questionaires. Men notoriously overreport their contributions to housework in such questionaires, as I recall.

http://www.umich.edu/news/?Releases/2002/Mar02/chr031202a

Oh! Yes, that seems like highly relevant information to know. Thank you much!

http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/Publications/Papers/achenproxyreports04.pdf

Here's an article about the phenomenon, although from this particular data they say its not clear whether men overreport or women underreport. Either way probably of interest just because of the data and analysis.

I'm amused that the points at the bottom of the article have the words "small blue ball" where there should be a bullet.

lesbian families *are* a better environment.

I agree, as a general rule, mainly because I consider pressuring one's child to prefer sexual partners of one gender rather than the other to be a distinctly abusive behavior, and I think it's obvious that heterosexual parents are more frequently prone to that than queer parents are.

That said, it's still possible that the author of the book being reviewed presented a badly flawed argument in favor of the perfectly valid assertion. On the other hand, it's also possible that the author presented a very good argument and the reviewer twisted it to sound like a flawed argument. It's hard to judge the quality of the book when I've only read the negative review of it. But it's not hard to judge the quality of the assertion the book was at least trying to make, and I certainly agree with the assertion.

I can't say much about these statistics, but I would definitely be interested if you find information about this from a less irritating source. I did a fairly in depth (by high school standards anyway) isu about inequality in lesbian vs hetero relationships. one of my sources (it was a little dated and had a tiny sample population) found that although both lesbian and heterosexual couples report sharing household tasks and family decision making, childcare is distinctly gendered, with mothers doing more.

You mean, critique something in the article besides the huge assumption that all fathers will provide the appropriate discipline?

(I've known heterosexual families with very, very, very laid back fathers who provided no discipline whatsoever, and I've known heterosexual families with fathers who left their children with no self esteem or confidence whatsoever, and fathers who were overly controlling, and also, some excellent outstanding fathers. In my own experience this has less to do with heterosexuality than with the individual father, but I'll admit that my evidence is entirely ancedotal, so squash it at will.)

My chief objection is that the study cited, at least in the article, did not distinguish between housework done by fathers living in households where the mother also works (in which case, yes, I have seen fathers in this situation do an equal amount of housework and childcare); fathers living in households where the mother works only part-time (in which case in my experience the mother does all of the housework/childcare even when the couple had a prior agreement that the father would help out at home); fathers living in households where the mother remains at home (ditto); and single fathers.

For example, my friend D is a father who does do 40+ hours of housework/childcare in addition to his job, but he's a single parent raising his daughter, and the mother lives several states away. Depending upon the sample size, one person like D (and D cannot be the only father in the U.S. in this situation) could really screw up the average number of household hours worked.

(And, um, the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research is so not the world's largest academic survey and research organization, unless you are speakly strictly about research done on family groups. Poor editing there.)

think there will be a game on X box 360 (http://getxbox360.5u.com/) based on it. just buy it )

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x box 360 game