Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [191]
As Mitchell Duneier has pointed out, many of the best ethnographic studies have been doctoral dissertations.9 These projects were not carried out by seasoned researchers but by novices who, despite their inexperience, have tremendous advantages. One is that frequently they are at a life stage that allows them to spend an enormous number of hours in the field. This immersion is often crucial for the establishment of rapport with participants and the subsequent development of rich theoretical insights. In the youths’ last year in high school (2001–2), I was still writing Unequal Childhoods. The following year, although I continued to think about beginning another round of observations and interviews for all of the youths, I faced many professional and personal obstacles to undertaking a labor-intensive study. I had significant teaching, advising, and professional responsibilities.10 The normal obligations of family life were heightened by the upheaval associated with the unexpected need for immediate and extensive home repair work. In addition, I faced personal challenges that year, with the deaths of my mother and a close family friend. Qualitative research intrudes further into the researcher’s personal life than does quantitative research, in that vital aspects of qualitative research are interpersonal rather than distanced. Despite my desire to reconnect with the twelve kids and to gather information about the key institutions in their lives, the prospect of launching another major study seemed overwhelming.
As with the initial study, a key problem presented by the follow-up was that the project was too big. With ethnographies, the more typical approach is to focus on one site—or even one family.11 With twelve families in the original study, Unequal Childhoods was too ambitious; subsequently, the longitudinal follow-up was also overly ambitious, which created complications at every point. If there had been only three families in the original study, I might have managed to gain access to the schools, follow kids around, and re-immerse myself in participant-observation. Doing that kind of follow-up with twelve (or even nine) families was not feasible.
There are, fortunately, some aspects of the longitudinal follow-up about which I remain enthusiastic. It was very helpful to examine the youths’ trajectory over time. The evidence of continuity rather than deflection in the trajectories is striking. Still, as I have tried to make clear here, there are very significant differences between the information yielded by interviews and the information yielded by participant-observation. Given the labor-intensive nature of participant-observation and the increased institutional demands on researchers, interviews are more common, but, despite some valuable features, interviews are inevitably less revealing about the rituals of daily life than are observations.12
THE COST OF RESEARCH: REACTIONS TO THE BOOK
The process whereby I learned what families thought about Unequal Childhoods unfolded over several months. As previously noted, the longitudinal follow-up consisted of in-depth interviews with all of the young adults, their parents, and, in most cases, one sibling. In some cases, such as with the Marshall family, I finished all of the interviews with the family members in the summer and then dropped off a copy of the book in the fall. Other times, I brought the book to the interview, and then when I came back to do another interview, I listened to how the families felt about the book. Some of the time, I heard what family members thought during telephone conversations (usually when I was calling to arrange another interview). Other times we were face-to-face. Sometimes I simply dropped by unannounced a week or so after having dropped off a copy of the book, just to see what the family thought. I usually brought food, such as a cake or a pie, when I came.13 In a few cases, I brought a tape recorder and taped the family members’ reactions to the book. “I want to be sure that I understand exactly