Families in Troubles Times: The Iowa Youth and Families Project

The globalization of world markets has contributed to a decrease in the material well-being of the average American family. The impact of such change has tended to affect specific segments of the economy at different times. During the 1980s, for instance, agriculture and related manufacturing were especially hard hit, and more recently people see major recessions in the high-technology industry of the Northeast and in California's military-driven economy. Studies of families in the Great Depression of the 1930s frequently reported that the way in which family members responded to one another was a major determinant of their eventual adaptation to severe hardship. Depression-era research, and particularly the work by Elder and his colleagues, provides the initial point of departure for the present study. This chapter presents the Family Stress Model, which people apply to the family's experience of economic problems.