Elinor Ochs's Fast-Forward Family

Fast-Forward Family, written by Elinor Ochs and Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, is a book made based on a study done in Los Angeles called the “Center on Everyday Lives of Family” study, from here on identified as the CELF study. Researchers were able to find thirty-two eligible families that self-selected themselves to participate. All families were middle-class Americans, with both of the spouses working at least thirty hours a week and had between two and three children. Thirty couples were heterosexual, the other two were homosexual; two men parent-figures for both families. Throughout more than fifteen-hundred hours of video on the families’ home life, the researchers were able to study various aspects and dimensions, and impacts of different values …show more content…
This idea of “the devil is in the detail,” (pg.250) that was highly enforced in most chapters, such as taking up paragraphs to break simple conversations down into gestures and specific tones and actions. In some aspects, these specifically detailed interactions could be fundamental to the overall functioning of the family such as child’s behaviours related to chores or parents implementing discipline; in most cases they seem redundantly over-emphasized and minimalistic to the relevance of the goal of the study. Since the ethnographers viewed only thirty second clips every ten minutes of video recording to analyze families in the home, it is easy to grasp how many small-scale interactions that may have been deemed important were simply missed in the viewings. This suggests that the low-level detail may not have needed to be as emphasized as importantly as they were in the research findings, and instead they shaded over the larger, more significant trends and aspects of the family that would have better revealed the “devilish” dynamics and smooth functioning (or lack of) within each