Attitudes, Care and Commitment: Pattern and Process

The paper develops a new analysis of attitudes to aspects of work and caring for children. The paper reports on analysis of data generated through a small scale survey designed and conducted with pilot study funding to follow up aspects of research by the ESRC Research Group for the study of Care, Values and the Future of Welfare. The survey research takes as a focus a specific point in the life course of parents: when they have children in the early years at primary school. The paper develops an analysis of the coherence of people's attitudes and their social location, with particular reference to social inequality. It also reports on new linked analysis of British Social Attitudes Survey data. In contrast to recent arguments of increasingly ‘autonomous’ subjectivities the research contributes to a broader theoretical understanding of the mutuality of subjectivities and extant social relations.