Kagitcibasi and Ataca (2005)

The studies reviewed up to this point deal with family roles, emotional closeness to family members, family values, and parenting ethnotheories. None of the reviewed studies included the concept of the value of children – Kagitcibasi’s starting point for the development of the theory of family change. Kagitcibasi and Ataca (2005) showed in a

comparison of the original Value-of-Children (VOC) data from 30 years ago and the data from the new VOC-study that in Turkey young mothers’ emotional VOCs increased and economic-utilitarian VOCs decreased over time. Furthermore, while in the 1975 original VOC-study three of four of young mothers reported a preference for a son if they could have only one child, in the 2003 study among the young urban mothers only about forty percent reported a son preference while about sixty percent preferred daughters.⁸ Mothers were also asked if they expected financial and practical support from a grown up son and daughter, respectively. Since the questions were differently posed (Yes/No in 1975, and as a scale from 1 to 5 in 2003), data from the current VOC-study were re-coded into categories to allow comparisons. According to these results in 1975 about ninety percent of mothers expected financial assistance from their grown-up sons in the future, while in 2003 only about thirty percent expected this kind of support. With respect to grown-up daughters, about eighty percent expected financial support in 1975 while only one quarter of the mothers expected it three decades later (similar differences resulted for practical support).

Though these differences are impressive they may be inflated: in Table 2 on p. 325, Kagitcibasi and Ataca (2005) note that the recoding of the 2003 interval-data into the ‘yes’

and ‘no’ categories was done by assigning the scale values 1 (“not at all”) and 2 (“a little”) to the ‘no’-category while assigning the scale values 4 (“a lot”) and 5 (“quite a lot”) to the ‘yes’-category, thereby implying that the middle scale value of 3 (“somewhat”) was not considered in the recoding. The authors note that “given that the scale points are different, this may be considered only an approximate comparison.” (p. 326). Since the percentages of the recoded

‘yes’ and ‘no’ categories all exactly sum up to 100%, mothers scoring a value of 3 in any of the questions were obviously not considered. Therefore, there is a systematic bias in the recoding procedure in direction of the no-expectation-category since mothers answering

“somewhat” – who were not considered – answered definitely more in direction of having expectations than not having any expectations. The results nevertheless imply a significant reduction in mothers’ expectations in grown-up sons’ and daughters’ financial and practical support from 1975 to 2003.

Data with respect to parenting goals could not be compared statistically since in 1975 mothers ranked parenting goals according to their importance for them while in 2003 they had to rate the parenting goals on a scale from 1 = ‘not important at all’ to 5 = ‘very important’.

8 In the non-urban Turkish samples – as in all other cultures in the VOC-study – participants had not been further probed when they said they had no sex preference, and therefore the data cannot be compared with the original study where all participants were forced to choose between the preference for a son or for a daughter.

At least for the young urban mothers with higher socio-economic status (SES) in the 2003 study, however, the parenting goal of obedience seemed to be less relevant than for the 1975 Turkish young mothers who ranked obedience as the number one parenting goal. Finally, Kagitcibasi and Ataca (2005) report comparisons of actual, desired, and ideal numbers of children between young mothers from 1975 and 2003. All three measures were significantly lower in 2003 as compared to 1975. For instance, in 1975 young mothers reported that they desired an average of 3.1 children while 2003 mothers reported an average of 2.3 desired children.

The findings reported point to a significant social and cultural change in Turkish society in the last three decades. All indicators show that on average, Turkish society is moving away from the traditional family model of (total) interdependence, and the results regarding the VOC-construct (rising importance of emotional VOC with at the same time declining economic-utilitarian VOC) even point in direction of a shift to the family model of emotional interdependence.

In addition to the comparisons between 1975 and 2003, Kagitcibasi and Ataca (2005) report comparisons across four generations (grandmothers, older mothers, younger mothers, adolescents) and three social strata (urban high SES, urban low SES, rural) for the 2003 VOC-data. Psychological (emotional) VOC was important for all generations, but somewhat less for adolescents, and it was somewhat more important for rural as compared to urban-high class participants. Strong differences were found for economic-utilitarian VOC with respect to social strata: here, urban high SES participants showed a lower importance than urban low SES participants who were in turn lower than rural participants. No such striking differences were found across generations. Similar differences were found with respect to the importance of having a boy and the importance of carrying on the family name.

With respect to mothers’ expectations from grown-up sons and daughters results showed a clear trend: with regard to material/utilitarian expectations (e.g., financial assistance) as well as non-material expectations (e.g., providing emotional support) mothers from the urban high social strata reported significantly lower expectations than mothers from the urban low social strata who in turn showed significantly lower expectations than rural mothers. Expectations did not differ much between sons and daughters with the exception of expected help with housework, which was markedly higher for daughters. Comparisons of parenting goals showed that obedience, popularity with others, and achievement in school received less importance form urban high SES mothers as compared to the other two samples.

On the contrary, the child’s independence and self-reliance was more important for urban high SES mothers than for urban low SES and rural mothers who did not differ from each other. Finally, the actual, desired and ideal numbers of children also differed across social strata: urban high SES samples showed the lowest numbers on all three indicators (about 2 children), and urban low SES samples were highest in actual (3.2) and desired (2.7) numbers of children, even higher than the rural samples. With respect to the ideal number of children, urban low SES and rural samples did not differ from each other.

When comparing the results of the 2003 generations and social strata comparisons with the cross-sectional comparisons between 1975 and 2003, it becomes clear that the modernization process goes along with urbanization. Many differences found between the 1975 and 2003 young mothers’ data did again show up between rural, urban low SES and urban high SES samples. Generational differences were not as strong though grandmothers often showed more traditional attitudes than the younger generations. Psychological (emotional) VOC was slightly higher for the rural than for the urban samples in the 2003 data, therefore the findings for this variable were not in accordance with the differences found across time where psychological VOC was on the rise between 1975 and 2003.

Despite this incongruity, in their discussion of the results Kagitcibasi and Ataca (2005) focus on the fact that the psychological VOC also did not really decrease from low to high social strata and interpret the overall results as providing support for the family model of emotional interdependence, largely because of declining material interdependencies across time and across social strata (from rural low to urban high). From my perspective, the conclusion of the authors that the results provide support for an emerging family model of emotional interdependence in Turkey is an overstatement. Of course, traditional values and material expectations are on the decline, and the emotional VOC remains high. But in their discussion of the results the authors ignore the social strata differences for the non-material expectations “continues living close to you” and “provides emotional support to you.” These are also on the decline from rural to urban high SES samples (see Table 7, p. 331). One could argue that the first of these two expectations is not necessarily emotional, and only the second is relevant, and that the expectation of emotional support remains rather high even for the urban high SES sample in spite of the differences. It cannot be ignored, however, that in this study (like in the studies by Georgas et al., 2006, and Keller et al., 2005) indicators of emotional interdependence do not follow the expected pattern of the proposed family model of emotional interdependence. It is also not sufficient to base one’s interpretation with regard to

non-material interdependencies solely on the psychological (emotional) VOC because the emotional VOC is expected to rise even in affluent and individualistic cultures assumed to be characterized by the family model of independence.