During a five year period (2001-2005), a group of physical and cultural anthropologists along with an ethnographic photographer (Jeanne E. Arnold, Anthony P. Graesch, Enzo Ragazzini, and Elinor Ochs) undertook an in-depth study of contemporary family life as a part of the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families. Some of their findings are published in a short book—Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open their Doors. The book itself is a dizzying array of information, beautifully depicted in ways that illustrate the rhythms of household life, transformations in social interactions between family members that may not have been anticipated by the architects who designed the homes they live in, the massive collections of stuff that American families collect and consume, and new data helping to understand both how members of the household understand their homes, how they use them, and how they feel inside of them.
The study itself is not generalizable for a number of reasons. For one, the sample size is only 32 families. All of the families self-identify as “middle class” (a problematic measure), representing a broad range of neighborhoods in southern California, including a range of ethnic and racial groups, with various occupations. Most of the families were heterosexual, but two of the families were not. As the authors put it:
Each family that joined the study consists of two parents who both work full time (or close to it), and two or three children, one of whom is 7-12 years old. We sought families that were negotiating the many challenges associated with having both parents in the workforce while they were raising young children. (17)
The data collected is the really interesting part of this study. In addition to interviews with family members, video documentation of their homes, photographs and counts of all of the objects and rooms in the homes, site visits at various points throughout the day, house history questionnaires, detailed architectural floor plans of the homes (included maps of when and how various rooms and spaces were used during the study), the team also had each family use a video camera alone and provide a self-guided tour through their home describing the various rooms as they deemed fit.
Inequality by (Interior) Design 