Life-Style Differences Among Urban and Suburban Blue-Collar Families

Blue-collar couples from a working-class suburb and from a working-class urban district are compared on a number of life-style variables. Suburban families are more likely than urban families to adopt life-styles resembling the middle class as indicated by measures of local intimacy, social isolation, family organization, church activity, orientations to social mobility and political perspectives. Controls for background variables and social-class identification do not appreciably alter these relationships. The analyses also reveal differential adaptations by husbands and wives to suburban residence-thus illustrating some of the problems in generalizing from findings that do not systematically account for sex of respondents. In conjunction with previous research the findings underline a need to reassess the frequently reported assumption that class values are the prime determinants of life-style regardless of residence. O ne of the significant trends in present day American society is the increasing migration of skilled and semiskilled manual workers to the urban fringe and into mass produced suburban developments (Lazerwitz, 1960; Dobriner, 1963 :50-54; Berger, 1960; Woodbury, 1955; Taueber and Taueber, 1964). The extent to which this trend has altered generalizations about suburban life-styles has been the subject of debate in both popular and professional literature (Dobriner, 1963; Berger, 1960; Seligman, 1964). In its simplest form, the question raised is: are working-class families who move to the suburbs substantially different in their lifestyles from those who remain in the city, or conversely, are the ways of life thought to be characteristic of suburbs altered by the influx of working-class people? Underlying this debate is the broader issue of whether life-styles can be attributed primarily to cultural and subcultural factors or to ecological and residentical characteristics. Writers stressing the primacy of cultural variables maintain that style of life derives less from the environs than from a set of values integral to a particular social category.1 Those holding the ecologicalresidential orientation emphasize the importance of structural characteristics of the community which contribute to certain forms of interaction, and channel the flow of communication in such ways that distinctive patterns of behavior are fostered.2 * This is an expanded and revised version of a paper read at the annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society, 1967. The research reported in this paper was supported by grants #3038 and 20-33 from the University of Minnesota Experiment Station. We are indebted to Joel Nelson, Murray Straus, and Joan Aldous for their reading and criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper. 1Berger (1960:13), for example, concludes that " a 'way of life' is a function of such variables as age, income, occupation, education, rural-urban background, and so forth, and that this is true for suburbs as it is for any other kind of modern community." (See also Dobriner, 1963 :23; Ktsanes and Reissman, 1959-60; Gans, 1967:274-295.) 2 For example, Shevky and Bell (1955), Greer (1956; 1960), and others argue that a high ratio of single-family dwellings to multiple dwellings in a community promote homeand family-centered orientations as well as a similarity of life routines among the residents. These factors, along with a greater amount of shared open space, increase casual and informal interaction among neighbors (Fava, 1958; Dobriner, 1963 :57-58). This form of interaction contributes to shared interests which, in turn, result in greater social participation both at the neighborhood and community levels (Greer, 1960). Finally, the relative isolation of the suburb is thought to account for greater dependence on the immediate nuclear famThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.45 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 05:37:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BLUE-COLLAR LIFE-STYLES 335 It is, of course, an oversimplification to depict either orientation as the singular explanation of life-style differences. There is general recognition that both locational characteristics and cultural values interact to produce the observed effects. The critical question, however, is the relative influence of these variables on life-styles. Three possibilities exist: either residence or culture has a sufficient independent effect so that, despite interaction with other relevant variables, one emerges as the prime influence on the development of life-styles; or the two variables in combination produce an effect fundamentally different from that which would be expected if either variable could function independently of the other. The primary concern of this paper is to provide data bearing on these possible outcomes.