Jessica Pearson

Legal Change and Child Custody Awards

This article compares custody award patterns in a sample of contested child custody cases filed in one jurisdiction of Colorado in 1966 and 1976, a time period which is prior to and follows the adoption of a sex neutral statute that stresses the best interest of the child in the judicial award of child custody. We find that legal change has had limited impact in the behavior of judges, evaluators, and couples themselves with mothers routinely acquiring custodial rights of the children following divorce unless shown to be unfit to parent. We also find an increase in the proportion of shared, joint, and split custody arrangements in 1976 and evidence that the new legal standards may be inspiring men to play a more aggressive role in contested child custody cases. This suggests that while new sex neutral standards may not translate into more father-only awards, they will mean greater paternal participation in custody in the years to come.

Women who farm: A preliminary portrait

Nearly 500,000 women are engaged in farm work. Although the majority are unpaid family workers, in recent years greater proportions are in salaried and managerial positions. In-depth interviews with farming women in Baca County, Colorado, however, suggest that wage classification has negligible predictive value in explaining a womans attitude toward farm work. Satisfaction with doing “mens work” depends on early socialization experiences and the degree to which a woman adopts the traditional female value system. The relevance of a masculinity—femininity dimension to distinguish women with career versus homemaking proclivities is demonstrated.

Decision-Making Responsibility: Development and Initial Validation of a New Measure for Low-Income, Nonresident Fathers:

Most measures of father involvement with children have been developed for use with middle-class fathers who reside with their children. The current study documents the development and initial validation of a new measure of decision-making responsibility for low-income fathers with a nonresident child. Focus groups conducted with 71 fathers revealed two dimensions of decision-making responsibility: making decisions with respect to direct care of the child and making decisions with respect to resources. Surveys were then collected from 542 nonresident fathers to validate a set of items measuring these two dimensions. The results of exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis supported these factors. However, the results of convergent and predictive validity tests suggest that the resources factor does not add additional explanatory power above its association with the care factor. We suggest using only the seven care decision-making items in future studies.