Message from the Chair:
Thank you for helping us grow

To our new members, welcome to the Family Section and thank you for helping us grow!  To our old members, thank you for your continued support and do not forget to renew your section membership when you renew your ASA membership!  The call for papers for the 2006 meetings in Montreal has been published, and I extend my deep appreciation to Annette Lareau, Kathryn Edin, Bill Axinn, Tom DiPrete, Phil Morgan, Mary Blair-Loy, Judith Hennessey, Marcia Carlson, and Jeni Loftus for their willingness to organize paper sessions.  We are going to have an outstanding program in Montreal next year. I also want to thank outgoing chair Steve Nock for leaving the section in such great shape, and outgoing Council members Paula England and Stephanie Byrd for their service and hard work.

We currently have a historic high of 772 members of our section, making us the 8th largest section in the ASA. Looking at our membership roster and list of participants from the past several meetings, I can also say that our section does a great job of drawing in well-known senior scholars into section activities, as well as junior scholars starting their careers. However, we have a lower proportion of student members than most of the other large sections, suggesting that we are not doing as much as we could to encourage our students to join the section and participate in the section’s activities. What if every regular member gave their students a gift of section membership after completing a thesis, dissertation, or doctoral exam in the family area? Or perhaps we could consider ways to use our roundtable time to discuss topics of particular interest to student members, such as finding mentors or writing partners at other institutions, how to locate and use good data on families and households, or using newer methodologies like HLM to study couples or family units. Please send me or incoming chair-elect Pam Smock any ideas you may have for strengthening student participation and membership in our section, while retaining our strong base of regular members. This is an exciting time to be studying families, and we want to make sure that our students share our enthusiasm and participate in our network of scholars.

At our section business meeting in Philadelphia, we discussed ways to broaden section participation in two new ways.  First, we decided to make an annual tradition of soliciting ideas for session topics at the business meeting to pass onto the chair-elect of the section. Second, we broached the topic of what to do with the significant treasury savings of moving to an on-line newsletter twice a year. Several ideas were mentioned, including a pre-conference symposium on pressing policy issues or new theoretical or methodological developments (marriage promotion, gay marriage, welfare reform, and  immigrant family adaptation  were mentioned as possible topics). At this point, Council is open to considering any good idea (dare I mention it? even lowering section dues), so please give me or anyone else on Council your feedback.

Don’t forget to submit a paper to one of our section paper sessions listed in this newsletter.  Just as important, send in those award nominations and don’t be shy about it! We have three section awards, the Distinguished Scholarship or Service Award, the William Goode Book Award, and the Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award (the chairs and deadlines for these are also listed in this issue of Family Forum).  I’m chairing the Graduate Student Paper Award, and am looking forward to seeing the range of new and creative ideas that young scholars have come up with.