Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century 32 Families Open Their Doors

This project, which emerged from a larger interdisciplinary research endeavor by UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families, studies 32 real-life, middle-class, dual-income households with school-aged children living in southern California 2001-2005. Presents a visual ethnography and ethnoarchaeology of middle-class American households, drawing on an archive of 20,000 digital images from the project and 1,500 hours of videotaped daily activities in the 32 homes, to show household material culture and how the physical household shapes behavior. Color photos demonstrate that behind the freshly painted exteriors and shady front yards of suburbia, there lies the total chaos of more possessions and less space and time.