Charlottesville, Virginia, Jan. 14, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- State of Contradiction: Progressive Family Culture, Traditional Family Structure in California
Release date: January 14, 2020
Contact: michael@ifstudies.org
(Charlottesville, VA)—California has long been at the cultural vanguard of family change in America and around the world, yet a new Institute for Family Studies report, based on a YouGov survey of 2,200 Californians, reveals that the Golden State has more intact families than the nation as a whole. Released today, State of Contradiction: Progressive Family Culture, Traditional Family Structure in California is authored by IFS senior fellow W. Bradford Wilcox and IFS research director Wendy Wang. Among the report's key findings:
- College-educated elites in California embrace values of family diversity in public but not in practice for their own private family lives. For example, college-educated Californians are 20 percentage points more likely to believe “family diversity should be celebrated” than less educated Californians but they are 20 percentage points more likely to be stably married and to embrace the belief that “it is very important for me, personally, to be married before having children.”
- Asians and immigrants are mostly responsible for California’s exceptional status when it comes to family structure. These two groups have the highest rates of intact families in the Golden State, with 80% of Asian families being intact and 70% of foreign-born Californians in intact families.
- When we zero in on neighborhood data from Harvard’s Opportunity Atlas, we see that many of California's most elite neighborhoods, including three in Hollywood, have single parenthood rates of essentially 0%. These communities often talk left and live right.
"State of Contradiction reveals a paradox at the heart of California's success," says report co-author W. Bradford Wilcox. "On the one hand, the Golden State has been a global messenger of expressive individualism, personal fulfillment, and tolerance—values associated with progressivism. On the other hand, the families that actually live in California tend to be traditional."
Download the full report by W. Bradford Wilcox and Wendy Wang or read a summary. Dr. Wicox and Dr. Wang are both available for interviews.
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