Armed with a $3.6 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and a wide range of anthropological, linguistic and psychological research methods, a team of UCLA faculty is producing a landmark study of a species under considerable stress: the middle-class, dual-income family.

The nine UCLA researchers have devoted three years to filming and documenting the everyday routines of 30 families residing in the greater Los Angeles area. The material then will be housed in the UCLA/Sloan Working Family Archive, where it can be studied in depth for years to come by researchers seeking to understand a sector of the American public that stands at a crossroads.

"No one has ever created a digital video archive of this sort," said Elinor Ochs, the team's leader and winner of a 1998 MacArthur Fellowship. "This center is promoting broad interdisciplinary tracking of how middle-class families day by day balance the responsibilities of work and family life.

"The idea is to get a sense of one week in the lives of 30 families," said Ochs, a professor of anthropology and applied linguistics in the UCLA College. "We want to capture a rich enough record so that people from many different disciplines can garner profound meaning from the material and do so for many generations to come."

The project is being conducted under the auspices of the UCLA/Sloan Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF), which is devoted to detailed, ethnographic research on middle-class families and home life.

CELF was founded by a $3.6 million grant from the Sloan Foundation, a New York City-based, nonprofit organization that sponsors research in a range of areas, including family life. Since 1995 the Sloan Foundation has established five other university centers that conduct research on working families. CELF is the only Sloan-sponsored center attempting to capture what researchers are calling "the drama of the working family" on video.

For more about the CELF study of working families, please visit the UCLA newsroom.