Doctoral Dissertation Research: Child Health and the Proximal Ecology of Stress: Scheduling American Family Life

Emory University, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

"Stress" and its role in adaptation and health are central to understanding human variation within biological anthropology. We have good measures of the effects of stress on the body, and good ecological models of general sources of social stress. Nonetheless, greater attention is needed to the social and cognitive mechanisms by which one translates into the other. The work of behavioral ecologists, while largely focused on ultimately evolutionary causes and adaptive trade-offs, nonetheless suggests that we might approach this through a focus on the deployment of two types of "resources" expended in any behavior: time and energy. Further, amongst developmentalists who focus upon ecologic stress in children, there is a tradition of comparing environmental "microniches" that set up different developmental ecologies and their corresponding outcomes. Combining these scientific traditions, this study uses a natural experimental model to consider how ecologic social stress translates into child health. Research suggests that the American "time bind" is experienced as a major stressor, and this may be related to changing work and living arrangements. This study will examine in detail the actual usage of time within metropolitan Atlanta families and families' perception of their use of time. These data are combined with hormonal markers of stress and arousal, and records of functional child health outcomes, including physical, psychological, social, and educational outcomes. The links between these outcomes and various characteristics of the daily schedules of families are considered, including tension, density, and fragility. This will extend our understanding of the day-to-day workings of "stress" by detailing specific biocultural pathways connecting social ecology to physiology and child health. The research will have a number of broader impacts. First, it will assist in the training of a graduate student in the field of biological/physical anthropology. Second, the information gathered helps us to better understand the relationship between "psychosocial stress" and the challenge of maintaining an acceptable "work/life balance." The maintenance of "work/life balance" has been of tremendous recent interest inside and outside the scientific community, including in business, where this is crucial to maintaining a well-functioning and thus productive work force. Finally, it will help us better understand the notion of "stress" itself, which has wide-ranging implications, since "stress" has been linked to personal health and well-being, and more indirectly to such social phenomena as school shootings, divorce, and child abuse, but often without sufficient understanding of how stress operates in people's daily lives.