Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [190]
The fact that I was able to reach 100 percent of the families is a strength of the follow-up study, as is the fact that I gained the cooperation of all of the young adults and most of the parents. Nonetheless, even this small study was labor intensive. In the end, I conducted nearly forty follow-up interviews. Then I arranged to have the interviews transcribed; next came coding and analyzing the data; and finally, the struggle to write up my findings. In short, the project was a major undertaking in which I invested significant time and energy. Nevertheless, I am fundamentally dissatisfied with the data set. Because my criticisms are conceptual they are relevant for other studies.
Social scientists see a longitudinal follow-up to an ethnography as having many potential virtues, including the ability to assess the degree to which original theoretical conclusions are sustained over time. The in-depth interviews I conducted were revealing, but they provide few surprises in terms of the youths’ and families’ trajectories. Over time, the inequalities in family life grew, rather than shrank. Although some of the working-class and poor families made important gains, the power of social class remained considerable. Hence, the follow-up supports the basic argument of the original study. These are interesting findings, and they may help satisfy readers’ curiosity about what happened as the youngsters profiled in the text grew into adulthood. But, like all other longitudinal studies based solely on interviews, the follow-up has important limitations. The research design precluded collecting the deeper, richer, and, I believe, ultimately more valuable data that come from participant-observation of the rituals of daily life. The original study, because it involved participant-observation across multiple settings, embedded the families and kids in a social context. The longitudinal follow-up isolated the young adults and families from the social context.
This is a crucial methodological difference.8 With no observations of daily life (and no interviews with educators or other key people), the longitudinal follow-up lacks the critical institutional information and triangulation of data that characterized the original study. This severely limits its value. The lack of institutional checks weakens the interview findings. There was no way for me to confirm the young adults’ portrayal of events; and it was impossible to ascertain the accuracy of information conveyed by family members about key life transitions. And, particularly compared to the observational data collected in the original study, the interviews shed less light on a fundamental point: that differences in social class matter because they provide unequal advantages in key institutions.
WHAT I WISH I COULD HAVE DONE
In hindsight, I wish I had visited the kids when most were in their senior year of high school to do observations; gather school transcripts, SAT scores, and college applications; and conduct interviews with key teachers, coaches, and counselors. But even as wishful thinking, it is hard to imagine. It would have been too formidable a task, for a variety of reasons. The nine youths featured most prominently in the book attended eight different high schools; the full sample of twelve covered ten different high schools. In the years since I began the original study, the paperwork requirements for doing research have escalated. Applications to the committee for the protection of human subjects (commonly known as an Institutional Review Board, or IRB) are much more detailed than in earlier years. The IRB must review and approve researchers’ interview guides, consent forms, letters of solicitation to recruit participants, etc. Moreover, the application process for research in schools is cumbersome; the permissions alone typically take many weeks. Likewise, negotiating access with districts, principals, and families involves countless