Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 15, 1991 TAG: 9104150148
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A4 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: RUTH S. INTRESS Richmond Times-Dispatch
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE (AP) LENGTH: Long
The family is eroding. Religion is dying. Crime is soaring. Reading is sliding. Customs are fading. Mobility has made us rootless.
The problem is, none of that may be true.
Talk of plummeting values makes for soaring television show ratings, but, in many respects, Americans today are not much different than their grandparents, says sociologist Theodore Caplow.
Much of what we take as fact about our times is self-perpetuated fiction rooted in imaginary trends, says Caplow.
"We don't want to hear that we do not live in a uniquely troubled age," the University of Virginia professor said.
So certain are we that times are getting worse, he added, that "it seems almost impious to challenge" those visions of gloom and doom.
But challenge them Caplow does in "American Social Trends," a personalized essay based on his 612-page study of U.S. social changes from 1960 to 1990.
That work, co-authored by Caplow and three other researchers, is based on decades of government studies, official censuses, sociological surveys and organizations' polls.
From Boy Scouts of America rosters to the U.S. Statistical Abstract, Caplow draws on this mountain of information to trace the past three decades' major trends in government, education, work, leisure, religion and family while charting the interplay of these institutions on our lives.
Caplow's "American Social Trends," just published by Harcourt Brace Javanovich Publishers, covers how we spend money to how often we drink beer to how we view sexual relations. It details the strains of bureaucracy and the failings of government to document America's shifting - and largely declining - place in the world.
Caplow acknowledges that huge gaps exist in available data about American life, with major league baseball statistics surpassing in completeness those that document key social trends.
"There is no way to paint a comprehensive picture of social change in modern society," he writes. Yet, it is possible, Caplow said in a recent interview, to sketch a fact-based image of how the United States is changing.
He portrays an America both courting financial disaster and on the brim of social and technological progress. His most unpopular findings may be those that shatter the imaginary trends we thrive on.
Our fast commutes on crowded freeways, for instance, convince us car crashes are more common today, when, in fact, statistics show that highways have grown safer in recent decades.
On matters of religious faith, 95 percent of people surveyed in 1986 said they believe in God, up slightly from a poll 40 years earlier. Religious attendance also is proportionately little changed since the 1940s, with about 40 percent now going to church or synagogue.
Similarly, crime soared from 1965 to 1979 but has since leveled off, albeit remaining high.
Neither are people more mobile. About one in five Americans changed residence in 1950 - the same percentage as today.
Few coastal fisherman still build their own boats, for example, but hobbyists throughout the country now continue the construction of such craft.
This differentiation is mirrored in other leisure activities, which further have grown in number and popularity despite our imaginary sense that life is more hectic today and contains less time for relaxation.
We are even reading more, despite the lure of television.
The number of new books published in the United States increased threefold from 1960 to 1986. Copy sales also increased by 31 percent from 1975 to 1985, with the number of bookstores in that period nearly doubling.
Caplow does not mask the new dangers society faces. For while America has ushered in a new era, the past three decades have brought us not only uplifting achievements but alarming setbacks.
As he writes, "We landed on the moon, but we lost our industrial supremacy. We emancipated minorities, but we created the most deprived underclass in the Western World.
"We expanded the welfare state, and we aggravated the problems of poverty, health care, crime and education. We enacted political reforms, and we got an unbroken string of political scandals. We enjoyed the longest economic boom in history, and we incurred a mountain of debt."
So monumental is the federal debt that it now redoubles every six years.
In 1940, he said, fewer than one in seven married women were in the labor force. By 1987, that proportion had almost quadrupled, to 56 percent.
Moreover, only a handful of married women with children under the age of 6 held jobs outside the home in 1940. By 1987, more than half of those mothers were in the work force - outnumbering the proportion of married women workers without young children.
Far more divorced and separated mothers held jobs in 1987, with their 85 percent rate higher than even that of married men.
The push by women into the work world is among this era's most consequential trends, Caplow believes. Its effects - along with the development of foolproof birth control methods and the acceptance of divorce and non-married cohabitation - have transformed family life in the past three decades.
Yet the traditional family, while shaken, has not been destroyed.
There have been few corresponding changes in family attitudes and values, which are "remarkably stubborn" in their passage from one generation to another, Caplow found in his studies of the people of Muncie, Ind.
Americans, he added, though commonly convinced there is a crisis in the contemporary family, repeatedly express in surveys and polls their own satisfaction with their home life, and the haven it provides.
Caplow deems this dichotomy "a hidden secret" that provides us "great psychic satisfaction . . . at very low social cost." It also plays off those imaginary trends, which in turn serve a curious kind of purpose.
by CNB