UNews - Dr. Susan McDaniel

The changing face of the Canadian family

caroline.zentner — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 15:54:51 +0000

Canadian families are becoming more diverse and they’re pretty stable units overall, as shown in the sixth and latest edition of Close Relations.

Authored by Dr. Susan McDaniel, a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge sociology professor and director of the Prentice Institute, along with Dr. Lorne Tepperman from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Toronto and Dr. Sandra Colavecchia from McMaster ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ, the latest edition draws statistics from a variety of sources to paint a portrait of Canadian families.

“The overall message in the sixth edition is that families are fine,” says McDaniel, Canada Research Chair in Global Population and Life Course. “They’ve changed and become more diverse. People who wring their hands and think everybody’s doing away with family should know that is not the case. The reality is most people stay married. The divorce rate has been relatively stable and in fact, it’s gone down. So, marriage is quite alive and well, but it’s also true that the alternatives to marriage are alive and well.”

More and more Canadians are living in long-term relationships without being legally married. They may have lived together for many years and have children together. Canada also has more people who are living a single life, whether they live alone and have a significant other in another location, have had a long-term relationship in their past, or are postponing marriage.

“It does mean that living alone is more popular than it ever has been,” says McDaniel. “Part of that is because we can. In the olden days, women in particular, but also men, had to marry someone to survive because they couldn’t afford to live alone.”

Another notable change in the Canadian family is a fast-growing Indigenous population. McDaniel sees huge possibilities for a growing pool of young people who want to be educated and join the labour market. Indigenous people often start having children when they are younger and their families are often larger.

“When they come to university, very often they already have children and that’s a very different kind of student than an 18-year-old straight out of high school,” says McDaniel. “The Indigenous student may have different needs because they have families already. If we could adapt to that and figure out how to handle that better, we could have more remarkable students come out of university.”

The latest edition of Close Relations also contains figures from the Aboriginal Peoples in Canada: First Nations People, Métis and Inuit National Household Survey of 2011, along with data from Statistics Canada.

“The figures show that 60 per cent of children who live on reserves and 41 per cent of Indigenous children who live off-reserve are considered to be living below the poverty line,” says McDaniel. “In the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission there is a kind of awakening to these problems, including intergenerational issues — how people who are beaten back by policy for generations, which is precisely what happened with the residential school situation, can be affected for generations.”

Another change in the fabric of the Canadian family is that more people with disabilities are becoming parents. This trend has the potential to develop into a policy issue, McDaniel says. A child with a disability becomes an adult with a disability and their parents, as they age, may become unable to look after their child, if that child is dependent. Parents worry about what will happen to their dependent adult children when they can no longer care for them or pass away.

“Most family trends are positive; we want people to live as long as they possibly can,” says McDaniel. “However, it creates policy and personal challenges on the family front. That’s something we don’t know a lot about but I think we should know more.”

McDaniel one of three finalists for SSHRC Insight Award

caroline.zentner — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 22:40:10 +0000

Dr. Susan McDaniel, a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge sociology professor, has been chosen as one of three top finalists in the Insight Award category of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s (SSHRC) 2016 Impact Awards.

“I extend my respect and congratulations to Susan, whose career is one most of us aspire to but few of us achieve,” says Dr. Claudia Malacrida, associate vice-president of research. “This is a real coup; a quick glance at the history of this award reveals that recipients have primarily come from five institutions in the country."

"I am very honoured that the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge nominated me for this award and deeply pleased to be on the list of three finalists. That said, this award is not about me or individual researchers, but that social science research makes a difference. Sometimes, as in the case of my research, it makes a big difference to policy and Canadian society," says McDaniel.

In addition to McDaniel, the other two finalists are Marc-André Bernier from the Université du Québec à Trois-Riviéres and James Waldram from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Saskatchewan.

Each year, the Impact Awards acknowledge the achievements of exceptional researchers, students and research partners who have received SSHRC funding. Awards are bestowed in several categories, including talent, insight, connection and partnership categories, and a Gold Medal recipient is chosen. This year’s awards ceremonies are scheduled for Nov. 22 in Ottawa.

McDaniel, director of the Prentice Institute and Canada Research Chair in Global Population and Life Course, primarily studies macro-level trends that intersect with the life courses of Canadians and others around the world. She was nominated by the U of L for her work in a SSHRC-funded study that compared Canadians’ and Americans’ views on retirement and financial security in middle age. This research project showed that older people in the future will likely be very different from older people today and their lives are being shaped dramatically by recent economic and political events. These differences highlight the need to adjust policy. From this research project, McDaniel launched another project looking into the aging workforce in Canada and the effects on the future labour market.

As a result of her research work, McDaniel is sought out by policy officials in Canada and elsewhere to advise on a range of social issues and challenges. McDaniel’s work has set the research agenda in several areas of population studies and sociology. Her research project informs a variety of initiatives in social and health policy related to healthy aging. Corporate policies about retirement planning and the aging workforce have been significantly impacted by her research results.

Research study finds Americans are more optimistic about the future than Canadians

caroline.zentner — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 18:10:43 +0000

Middle-aged citizens of the United States have faith in the American dream and believe that it will continue into the future, despite greater adversity in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession.

That sense of optimism was among the key findings of a research paper soon to be published in the Journal of Aging Studies. A trio of researchers, led by Dr. Susan McDaniel, Canada Research Chair and director of the Prentice Institute for Global Population and Economy at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge, asked middle-aged Canadians and Americans what they anticipate in their future lives and in the future lives of their children when they reach middle age.

American respondents worried about their own future financial security and retirement but they expressed optimism about their children’s futures. While Canadian respondents also subscribed to the belief that hard work and sacrifice will lead to a better future for their children, many of those interviewed expressed doubt about their children’s prospects, and more Canadians thought their children’s lives would be a real struggle.

“Now they’re saying ‘Maybe my kids won’t be better off than me,’” says McDaniel. “If you’re still working hard and sacrificing but your kids are not gaining, what does that mean in the long run? This could be a long-term shift and we’re beginning to dig into these questions in this study.”

The researchers also found that the intergenerational contract, which implies that the young will support the old, that adult children will leave the family home and become independent, and that older people will retire to make room for younger workers, is shifting and changing.

“The old assumptions that younger or working people will support older people are not working out that way at all,” says McDaniel. “The support is going the other way.”

In this prospective life course study, McDaniel and Dr. Amber Gazso, York ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ, and Dr. Karen Duncan, ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Manitoba, interviewed people ranging in age from 45 to 64 in 2013, a few years after the 2008 economic recession. The respondents came from two socio-economic classes in comparable cities in the U.S. and Canada.

McDaniel can’t say whether Canadians are more pessimistic or just more realistic than Americans. The after-effects of the Great Recession are still being felt in the U.S., especially with regard to housing foreclosures, defunct pension plans and massive numbers of discouraged workers who have given up job searching.

“The unemployment rate is lower than it has been but many people argue that’s because so many people have given up finding work. Whether we understand the longer-term implications of all that, we don’t know,” she says.

While the researchers can only speculate about the future, McDaniel says social policy-makers may find they need to do some major rethinking of social programs. If young people experience an incomplete launch into adulthood or their career paths are bumpy and they don’t accumulate a pension, their prospects in middle age or older could be dim indeed.

“So many things are shifting here that it may be true that we’re going to see a whole different ball game in terms of opportunities for those young people today when they’re old,” says McDaniel. “In that case, we might have to re-examine a whole lot of things in terms of policy, planning and thinking.”

UNews - Dr. Susan McDaniel

The changing face of the Canadian family

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