Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [199]
Some researchers have successfully negotiated this process. They have shared their work and argued with participants over the portraits. They have made changes. They have used the prepublication stage to “work through” conflict. Ethnographers such as Hugh Mehan, Tim Black, Mark Warren, and others have managed to make clear their sincere interest in respondents’ feedback, but also make clear that the goal is to correct inaccuracies and not to reshape the written representation.32 Some advocates of prepublication discussions in which subjects provide their interpretation of events feel these sessions offer the potential additional advantage of helping researchers deepen and improve their analyses.
In many instances, researchers who have been most successful in soliciting input from respondents without relinquishing control over the published text were studying organizations and organizational policies. Often, work in these areas draws on stable data collected from written memoranda, published documents, and public records, as well as the more volatile evidence supplied by human subjects. Many researchers who study organizations strive for compromise, “toning down” their analyses to accommodate respondents’ concerns. This approach has costs, however. The portraits often become less sharply focused, particularly with respect to weaknesses or problems in an organization.33
Generally, organizational dynamics are more public, and certainly less personal, than child rearing. In studies of more private settings, it is easy for people to feel criticized, even when that is not the researcher’s intent. Ultimately, many decisions researchers make are dependent on the particular context as well as on the researchers’ own sensibilities. They cannot be mandated. In my case, I worried that showing a draft of the manuscript to the families would make the book hard to complete. I was not primarily concerned about issues of accuracy. The research assistants and I were in the homes frequently, and we took very detailed notes, sought disconfirming evidence, carried out in-depth interviews, and made every effort to make only claims that were buttressed with ample data. But if, as I anticipated, the families did object to how they were portrayed, I would feel deeply conflicted. I would want to stand by my analysis but also please the participants. The result would be paralysis; I would find myself unable to move the book to closure. (Researchers vary in how easy they find writing and/or wrapping up a project. I find both steps challenging.) What if some participants found their portrait so painful that they requested that I drop that chapter? What would I do then? For example, even now, the Yanellis continue to find their portrait quite painful. If I had shown it to them ahead of time, they would have demanded that it be removed from the book or that it be radically restructured to eliminate their sense that they had been made to look like child abusers. If I had taken out the chapter, the book would have been weaker. If I had dropped the discussion of discipline, the central argument of the chapter would have been gutted. If I had proceeded to publish despite the Yanellis’ intense objections, I would have severely damaged our relationship.34