Stephen Sweet

Integrating Educational Careers in Work and Family

Educational careers are shaped by both work and family roles. This study compares middle-class dual-earner couples in which wives were currently returned to school (N = 124) with couples in which the wives had never returned to school (N = 866). These data are combined with additional in-depth interviews with 24 women who returned to school. Our life course perspective highlights why working women return to school, the resistance they experience in redefining family roles, and outcomes on family and marital satisfaction. Gendered family adaptive strategies, made earlier in the life course, are associated with the decisions to return to school and the negative impact this decision has on family life quality.

Dual Earners Preparing for Job Loss: Agency, Linked Lives, and Resilience

We draw on a two-wave panel survey and a third wave of in-depth interviews to study how 78 dual-earner couples prepared for job loss and the implications of preparation for resilience. We find personal and social resources predict preparation: those displaced workers who prepared had higher energy and higher incomes prior to job loss and also worked for employers who provided advance notification. Couples’ egalitarian career strategies are associated with lower levels of preparation as well as limited options in the face of displacement. Less preparation is associated with less favorable career adjustments following job loss as well as more severe health and emotional challenges.

Dual Earners in Double Jeopardy: Preparing for Job Loss in the New Risk Economy

Both declining job security and the need for dual careers constitute two complicating factors in the lives of middle-class American families. Rarely, however, are these two phenomena investigated simultaneously. Drawing on both survey and in-depth interview data of a sample of middle-class couples in upstate New York, we document the pervasiveness of couple-level job insecurity, and the extents at-risk couples anticipate job loss and employers prepare workers for job termination. We argue that the new middle-class job insecurity is effectively doubled for dual-earner couples, reshaping the temporalities of career development across the life course.

Testing the Flat World Thesis Using a Public Dataset to Engage Students in the Global Inequality Debate

We present a learning module to engage students in the global inequality debate using Google Public Data World Development Indicators. Goals of this article are to articulate the importance and urgency of teaching global issues to American students; situate the central debate in the globalization literature, paying particular attention to global inequalities and trajectories of convergence or divergence in life chances; and demonstrate the value of engaging students in the analysis of macro-level data. These data enable students to test assumptions concerning gaps in opportunities that separate wealthy societies from poor societies and determine whether these gaps are narrowing or expanding. Depending on the course content and combinations of indicators studied, students reach different conclusions concerning the merits of a “flat world” thesis. We find that teaching about global inequalities and engagement with global data reshapes students’ beliefs and enhances student interest in the concerns of global relations.

Using Local Data To Advance Quantitative Literacy

In this article we consider the application of local data as a means of advancing quantitative literacy. We illustrate the use of three different sources of local data: institutional data, Census data, and the National College Health Assessment survey. Our learning modules are applied in courses in sociology and communication, but the strategy of using local data can be integrated beyond these disciplinary boundaries. We demonstrate how these data can be used to stimulate student interests in class discussion, advance analytic skills, as well as develop capacities in written and verbal communication. We conclude by considering concerns that may influence the types of local data used and the challenges of integrating these data in a course in which quantitative analysis is not typically part of the curriculum.