Most people avoid getting in the middle of somebody else's family conflicts, let alone revisit the issues over and over again. Not Rand and Kathi Conger.

For years these UC Davis human development researchers and their staff have been watching countless family arguments, estranged couples, rebelling teenagers and quarreling siblings. Not only that but the Congers go back, periodically, and ask the parents and their children, "What happened next...?"

It's all confidential, reported on videotape or paper, been coded for specific interactions, and fed into databases stored at their Cousteau Place lab in east Davis.

From this research, the Congers are figuring out answers to what makes for happy families and raising children into strong adults. Their work — using sociology laced with psychology to look at human resiliency — has been yielding conclusions about the American family that challenge long-held views about our closest relationships.

Patterns reveal themselves over years that researchers doing snapshot research of relationships might not see, uncovering some of these non-conventional conclusions.

"We think of divorce and separation as happening within a marriage, but it also happens in these other family relationships," Rand points out.

While parents and children or siblings may suffer estrangement similar to divorce, Rand says that the ways that families avoid such problems begins with involved and caring parents.

Kathi, who has focuses on sibling relationships, has found that the quality of lifelong relationships between siblings influences their individual mental and physical health, social functioning and well being. This idea of siblings being so central to a person's lifelong well-being is another idea that has challenged conventional wisdom.

"It is not just the absence of hostility but the presence of warmth in these relationships that helps define the quality and, thus, the long-term success or failure of one sibling's relationship with another," she says.

Decades-long research

These kinds of observations take a long time in arriving, which is the beauty of observing people over decades, according to Rand, a professor of human and community development, who arrived at UC Davis with his wife, Kathi, an assistant professor, in 2001 from Iowa State University.

UC Davis' renowned Human Develop-ment and Family Studies Division hired the Congers because of their expertise in studying family influences over the long-term. Department chair Beth Ober points out that these type of long-term, multigenerational studies have long been a hallmark in the UC Davis human development program, as exhibited by UC Davis Professor Emerita Emmy Werner.

Her 40-year study of resiliency among a group of Hawaiians made history among family development scholars.

"For a long time, people have studied families at one point in time, but longitudinal studies are still rare," Rand says. Such studies are expensive, require extended national grants and depend upon a research team willing to maintain institutional history and boxes of old data.

The Congers have been following the lives and fortunes of children from 550 families of European origin living in rural Iowa since 1989, and another 900 African American families in Georgia and Iowa since 1995. In fact, the seventh graders they started following in Iowa some 16 years ago are still being studied now that they are 28 and 29 years old with families of their own, and the African American children are now teenagers.

In Rand's newest study on Mexican Americans in Sacramento, he plans to broaden his research questions to look at the interplay between common family strategies for survival and specific cultural values.

He expects to see conflicts between traditional Mexican family values and mainstream values of the U.S. society played out as immigrant children straddle the two cultures. He also expects that older brothers and sisters will play a part in family dramas.

Ultimately, the Congers are looking for the essence of survival for families in times of stress — lost jobs, intergenerational conflict over values, divorce or death, substance abuse or health problems, all of which are part of life.

While pressures that lead to conflict may be similar for all families, Rand believes there may be unique ways that different cultures pull their families back together.

"We keep learning from successful families how to deal with the strains and demands in our lives," Rand says.