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Children of the Great Depression. G. H. Elder. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1974.
The tidal wave of the Great Depression had washed over most of the United States by the early 1930s, and the lives of many American families were never the same. But as Glen Elder reminds us, not all families experienced economic devastation, much as the economic boom of today has failed to reach a sizable proportion of the population. In Children of the Great Depression, Elder takes us on a journey through a vast store of archival data to examine how economic deprivation affected families in different ways. To provide a basis for comparison, families were assigned to one of four categories: middle class deprived (having lost at least 35% of their income between 1929 and 1933), middle class nondeprived, working class deprived, and working class nondeprived. Based on this typology, the author examined the manner in which economic changes forced families to adapt, modifying the way children were socialized and affecting their life choices from preadolescence through adulthood.
The foundation for Elder's book is a study of the effects of Depression experiences on the social and psychological lives of 167 White children who were fifth- and sixth-grade students in Oakland, California. In the 1960s, Elder carefully examined data amassed by a research team headed by psychologists Harold Jones and Herbert Stoltz beginning in 1932 for a longitudinal analysis known as the Oakland Growth Study. Although the original intent of this now-famous study, conducted under the auspices of the Institute of Child Welfare (now the Institute of Human Development), was to examine individual development through the...