"You are now entering Loyalist Sandy Row, heartland of South Belfast Ulster Freedom Fighters."

Painted in large black letters flanked by red fists and a depiction of a masked, machine-gun wielding fighter, this is the mural that greeted Mick Cunningham, 39, and his family as he came into Belfast, Northern Ireland, in August 2006.

The mural is a remnant of Northern Ireland's decades-long internal conflict. It was of particular interest to Cunningham, who spent a year in Belfast studying how the conflict has affected families.

"Conflict is disruptive and painful," says Cunningham, a professor of sociology at Western Washington University. "It turned out by the end of the Cold War, there was a real resurgence of ethnic conflict throughout the world. … We didn't, and still probably don't know, a lot about how living through such a conflict affects families."

Life in warring zones has been an interest to Cunningham for some time, but he hadn't had a chance to study it until his trip last year, when he was on paid leave from Western. In that time he lived with his wife and two young children in a middle-class neighborhood near Queen's University Belfast, the school where he worked doing research, studying statistics about family dynamics.

"It was, for me, surprisingly normal," he says of Belfast life. "Unless we went to certain places, the everyday evidence of the conflict was relatively low."

But the evidence was there nonetheless.

Aside from murals and flags, stories-high "peace walls" still loom between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods, high enough that bottles, rocks and flaming items can't be thrown over to the other side. Many schools are still segregated by religion, Catholic students going to one school and Protestant students to another.

"Those were really the main, lasting things you could see. There are no more checkpoints on the border, there's no visible military presence," he says. "Once we settled in, we realized our day-to-day lives were probably as safe as they are here."

While Cunningham was living in Belfast, he got to watch as the country formed a new government and went through successful elections. He could see the change on a large, human scale. In the statistics he pored over for his study, changes on a family scale were evident as well.

"There's been incredibly rapid change in the last decade that looks a lot like catching up with other parts of Europe," he says of the increased number of and acceptance of children outside of marriage and cohabitation. "It's looking more like families in other places."

Another result of the turmoil's end has been a desire for some families to return to traditional values and distinct gender roles.

Though he's been back living in Bellingham and working at Western, Cunningham is already planning a trip to visit Northern Ireland this summer, so he can check up on friends his family made during their stay. It's a connection he hopes to keep strong for some time to come.

"I find it personally energizing, and it's also why I became a social scientist," he says of travel. "It's only in seeing how other people live and experience the world that you can make sense of your own experience."