Sarah Fenstermaker Berk

What a Difference a Day Makes: An Empirical Study of the Impact of Shelters for Battered Women

In this article we evaluate the impact on spousal violence of shelters for battered women. Drawing on formal, hybrid theory from economics and sociology, we predict that shelters will have beneficial effects only for battery victims who are already taking control of their lives. For other women, a shelter stay may in the short run encourage retaliation. Using a two-wave panel of wife-battery victims, we find that our hypotheses are by and large supported. Some policy implications are briefly discussed.

A Simultaneous Equation Model for the Division of Household Labor

In this paper a three-equation, nonrecursive model for the household division of labor is proposed based on recent work in the New Home Economics. The model is estimated with data from a sample of 184 households. In contrast to the earlier studies of household work, direct measures are provided for the household efforts of husbands and children and substitution effects are isolated from income effects. While wives (as expected) are found to do the majority of household tasks almost regardless of circumstances, the household division of labor does respond in many ways which are consistent with the Household Production Function. However, important anomalies also surface which call into question many of the models underlying assumptions.

Bringing the cops back in: A study of efforts to make the criminal justice system more responsive to incidents of family violence

This paper examines the ways in which the criminal justice system typically responds to incidents of violence between adult members of the same household and then using a three equation, nonrecursive time series model considers the impact of efforts in one locale to improve law enforcement practices. Three questions are addressed: (a) can the apparent underreporting of domestic violence by police be improved; (b) can the quality of information funneled from police to the District Attorneys office be enhanced; and (c) can the number of offenders held accountable for their actions be increased?

Throwing the cops back out: The decline of a local program to make the criminal justice system more responsive to incidents of domestic violence

Evaluations of the impact of social programs are almost always a onetime undertaking. A particular social program is selected for scrutiny, data are collected and analyzed, final reports are written, and the evaluation is over. Whatever the final assessment, research teams move on to the next project; the program has been evaluated. In practice, of course, the majority of social programs outlive their evaluations. Yet few are evaluated a second time, presumably because there is no felt need, Public officials perhaps assume that social programs are sufhciently static so that evaluations from one historical period can be easily generalized to others. And while replications may be of considerable interest to the academic community, the amount of new information per dollar may be low in the eyes of people who authorize and fund program assessments. In an earlier article (Berk, Loseke, Berk, and Rauma, 1980), we reported an evaluation of an LEAA funded effort to make the Santa Barbara County criminal justice system more responsive to incidents of family violence, especially cases of wife battery. In brief, the Family Violence Program (FVP) had four related goals: (1) to encourage police officers to report all cases of family violence that came to their attention, (2) to encourage police officers to properly document such cases so that informed prosecutorial decisions could be made, (3) to increase the number of batterers sanctioned by the criminal justice system, and (4) to make

Dividing It Up

Up to now, considerable time has been spent on the argument that an understanding of the division of household labor turns on at least two critical components: (1) a clear distinction between household productive capacity and its allocation among household members and (2) formal acknowledgement of the reciprocal relation between household and market labor investments. These two dimensions of household production have done the most to inform the organization and analysis of the data. For example, the conceptual distinction between the household “pie” (made up of domestic and market labors) and the efforts of individual members has led to both methodological and substantive departures from earlier efforts. It has also meant some theoretical dependence on the New Home Economics, as well as taking some empirical liberties with it. In particular, households are conceptualized as both productive units and collections of separate individuals. It is in this chapter, where the household-task and market-time contributions of individual members will be examined, that the merits of this conceptualization can be demonstrated.

Going Backstage Gaining Access to Observe Household Work

This paper draws on initial field experiences of the authors as participant observers of family members engaged in household work. Negotiating access and establishing rapport provided more than unusual problems of data collection. Such experiences also generated substantive insights into the characteristics of household work. Discussion focuses on the relationships between features of the household work setting, lack of consensus on the criteria by which household work is judged, and respondent views of household work.

Choice versus Constraint in Households, Employment, and Gender@@@The Gender Factory: The Apportionment of Work in American Households.@@@Households, Employment, and Gender: A Social, Economic, and Demographic View.

Events of the past 30 years have profoundly transformed arragements governing love work and the their routinization in households and employment; yet some patterns endure relatively unchanged. This book draws from both economics and sociology and from the work of demographer in both disciplines. Chapter 1 summarizes the changes that have occurred in the postwar period chapter 2 presents a conceptual framework for understanding these relationships ant their evolution and the remainder of the book expands on this framework and applies it to explaining the relationships of household employment and gender in the postwar era. In addition 3 levels of integration are offered: 1) the integration of households and employment showing similarities and causal links between household and employment arrangements; 2) a conceptual framework that includes both individuals choices and constraints that limit and price available options and 3) an integration of economic and sociological views of employment demographic behavior and other household behavior. Results show that the assignment of child rearing and housework to women the sex segregation of jobs and the sex gap in pay have been much more resistant to change than fertility the double standard of sexual morality female employment or the volume of housework that is performed. Also dramatic increases in female employment rates along with modest changes in female occupational segregation and only very recent change in the sex gap in earnings are noted.

Sample Characteristics and Initial Description

This chapter includes a brief discussion of the sample of 335 households, as well as a first glimpse of the measures of household labor and market time. The short discussion of some selected characteristics of the sample gives a broad overview of the households under study and provides some basis from which to later judge the external validity of the findings. One could argue that simply because the data were collected in 1976, the patterns that emerged (particularly for the division of household labor) depart from those that might be found today. Those who believe that the social relations of the household have been radically transformed since the 1970s will find the descriptive statistics presented in this chapter useful for comparison with future studies of the division of household labor.

The Household “Pie”

The discussion of theoretical, conceptual, and methodological concerns in the last three chapters has set the stage for an examination of the total effort that households devote to domestic and market activities. In the introductory chapter, I argued that a study of the apportionment of household and market labors must rest fundamentally on an understanding of what households need to accomplish. Moreover, the mechanisms by which individual members divide their labors and their labor time are first seen most appropriately in the context of the total productive output of households.

Measuring Household and Market Labors

The data that describe the allocation of household tasks and time are drawn from a larger research effort launched in 1976. For that study, the data allowed for an analysis of the apportionment of household and market labors, the content and organization of the household day (Berk and Berk, 1979), and the reactions of women to the “job” of household work (e.g., Berheide et al., 1976; Cannon, 1978; Berk, 1983). Because it was a first attempt to comprehensively portray the domestic work life of women and their families, only intact American households were included in the original sample. Moreover, given that the literature to date had devoted only scant attention to the organization of domestic work, and to avoid the complications posed by agricultural labor (see Hacker, 1977), only urban areas with populations greater than 50,000 were sampled.