Student Research: Sociology of the Family

In Sociologyy 36, Sociology of the Family, students conduct primary research to gain insight into their parents’ experiences of balancing work and family. Students interview their parents, transcribe their stories, and analyze them. It is often hard to truly understand the sacrifices our parents made to raise children, the tradeoffs they experienced as they made decisions about whether to stay at home or return to work after the birth of a child, and the ways that these decisions affected their parenting, marriages, and relationships with their children. Engagement with this oral history project comes at a critical moment in the lives of Dartmouth students when understanding the factors surrounding their childhoods can enlighten their own work and family decisions going forward.