soc101

Analyzing Everyday Life: The Second Shift: Gendered Norms and Household Labor

This Data Workshop allows you to uncover some of the realities of everyday family living through interview. With this workshop, you will capture the accounts of working parents’ daily lives. You are asked to interview an individual who is a parent and a member of the paid labor force about his or her daily schedule. You are to ask the interviewee to be candid and to answer questions as completely as possible. Then, you are to ask the person to describe everything that he or she does in a typical day, identify the types of work, and explain how tasks are divided among members of the household. In addition, you are to determine how these tasks affect the relationships between members of the household. If possible, interview another individual too. After the interview, you are to analyze the data by asking the following questions:

1. Does there appear to be a gendered division of labor in the home? How are the tasks divided? Who does most of the daily work and why?

2. Did your interview confirm that women do more of the second shift, or was your respondent an exception to the rule?

3. Is it inevitable that one person in a couple always does more work than the other? What effects might these inequities have on marriages and live-in relationships? Can you think of a better solution to sharing household labor?

4. What might you have learned if you could have interviewed the other partner as well?

5. Although a single interview is not a scientific sample, do you think your findings could still apply to a larger population?