Videotaping the DEMCMCAH

Families, like organisms, adapt over time to the environment they exist within. My Grandparents' family behaved in very different ways to how my family behaved when I was growing up, and my own family has also evolved in how it behaves and operates. While this seems like a "so what" observation, there is not much research out there that confirms or disproves that idea. So this article in the NY Times seems timely.

At a conference here this month, more than 70 social scientists gathered to bring to a close one of the most unusual, and oddly voyeuristic, anthropological studies ever conceived. From 2002 to 2005, before reality TV ruled the earth, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, laboriously recruited 32 local families, videotaping nearly every waking, at-home moment during a week — including the Jacket Standoff.

Filmmakers have turned a lens on the minutiae of unscripted domestic life before, perhaps most famously in “The Osbournes” on MTV and the 1970s PBS program “An American Family.”

But the U.C.L.A. project was an attempt to capture a relatively new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle-class American household. The investigators have just finished working through the 1,540 hours of videotape, coding and categorizing every hug, every tantrum, every soul-draining search for a missing soccer cleat.

“This is the richest, most detailed, most complete database of middle-class family living in the world,” said Thomas S. Weisner, a professor of anthropology at U.C.L.A. who was not involved in the research. “What it does is hold up a mirror to people. They laugh. They cringe. It shows us life as it is actually lived.”