Work, Family Studies Infuse Maume's Research, Career

Twenty-one years after leaving the Illinois Institute of Technology for Cincinnati, sociology professor David Maume continues to seek out and make the most of every opportunity.

And from the Taft Fund to the enthusiasm of students and colleagues, he has found no shortage of ideas and support throughout his tenure here.

"At Illinois, it was strictly service teaching, with almost no resources for research," said Maume, director of the Kunz Center for the Study of Work & Family. "UC has been very good to me."

A sample of Maume's work in just the past few months: • Just recently, began collecting data for an NSF-funded study of how work schedules affect the health and family lives of retail food workers, with major input from Kroger employees.

Sociology professor David Mame, director of the Kunz Center for the Study of Work & Family.

• In January, the publication of a paper in the ANNALS on white attitudes toward black coworkers.

• In November, the publication of a paper in the Journal of Marriage and Family on gender differences in restricting work efforts for the sake of family life.

Students play vital roles in every aspect of Maume's work. Recently, undergraduate paid workers filled the stations at the Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing, CATI, lab in Crosley Tower, conducting telephone surveys with retail food workers.

Students working on that project will code and clean the data resulting from the telephone surveys, then, do some analyses of these data – for example, Maume said, do men or women have more trouble sleeping?

"The classroom lessons learned in research methods and statistics will be reinforced by working on a real-world project," he said.

More typical, though, Maume's graduate students benefit from working on projects with him, he said. In his basic research, he said, "graduate students often appear as co-authors on my papers (after having done literature reviews, cleaned and analyzed data, and written a part of the paper)."

In contract work within the Kunz Center – for example, the multi-researcher PULSE project that studied the status of women and girls in the greater Cincinnati area – graduate students work with Maume to collect, organize and present the data.

"In the case of the PULSE project, graduate students also served on the various workgroups that met with community stakeholders, and they attended the community forums that were part of the PULSE process," he said.

Many of Maume's projects seem to flow well from one to the next. A strong support system helps immeasurably – and the fact that right now, he's hitting at one out of every two proposals for funding.

"Before becoming interested in the work-family nexus, in the early 1990s, I had been doing studies of economic inequality since the early 1980s. I am still interested in these issues," he said.

Sociology students conduct telephone interviews as part of David Maume's NSF-funded study of how work schedules affect the health and family lives of retail food workers.

"At a certain stage in a scholar's career, all of that reading, writing, and contemplation begins to pay off. One is quicker to see the connections between ideas, more experienced in handling data, and a better writer. It also helps that about this time, children strive for independence and move out of your house! I would say that most of the time, my projects do blend naturally from one to another. On the other hand, getting a project funded does involve a lot of preparation and consumes most of your time. Without departmental, college and university support, it is far more difficult to secure funding for your research agenda."

Publishing, too, spills over into all aspects of his work.

"First of all, let me say that while publishing is part of my identity as a scholar, it also reinforces my efforts to be a good teacher," Maume said. "I notice that when I talk about my research or that of my colleagues, students 'perk up' and begin to ask questions about the process, measurement, bias, what findings mean, etc.

"Professors who are accustomed to thinking analytically pass on that enthusiasm and skill to their students. And, when students develop their analytic skills in the lecture hall and in seminar, their questions often become the catalyst for new research projects for professors – I can point to at least three papers on my vita where student inquiries were the motivating factor in my pursuing the project. At a place like UC, good teaching and research mutually reinforce each other. Everyone I know in the college manifests this sentiment in the way they approach their own work."

That said, he added, "few of us can sustain a scholarly career without the support our colleagues." And space constraints, he said, "do not permit a full description of all of the ways that my department contributes to my scholarly career."

But two additional sources of support are invaluable, he said.

"First, for those of us in the humanities and social sciences, we only need to go to our respective annual professional conferences and talk to less-fortunate colleagues to appreciate the contributions of the Taft Fund to our collective success," he said.

"In my own case, Taft provided me with a sabbatical grant that gave me the time to prepare and receive a grant from NIH in 2003, and they provided supplemental funds when my current NSF grant could not pay wages to students doing the telephone interviews.

"Second, the college purchased hardware and renovated the space that became the Sociology-Political Science Survey Laboratory in 1606 Crosley. This is an invaluable resource that supports the instructional and basic research missions of both departments. Former Dean Gould saw how this resource could benefit the social sciences in Crosley Tower, and I hope that our productive use of this resource serves as an enduring testament to her unique insight."