• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1335 0

to a question we posed in interviews at the end of the study) that they wanted to “help us out” and that the $350 we offered to help offset the inconvenience of the visits made participating more attractive.14 I believe the money made a decisive difference for most, but not all, of the families. Indeed, two families on public assistance who were asked to be in the study declined. My own assessment is that especially among the working-class and poor families, the children were strong allies. At the interview stage, I believe the fact that the children knew me and seemed to like me was a tremendous help in gaining parents’ cooperation.15 In addition, the parents had an extended period of time to get to know us before we asked them to be in the observational study. The process of recruiting parents for interviews and then conducting the interviews involved multiple contacts, including a call to confirm the night before. The interviews lasted from 90 to 120 minutes, and almost all were conducted in the participating families’ homes. As a thank-you we brought along a bakery pie and then mailed a handwritten thank-you note. Since we interviewed parents separately, we repeated the whole process in families where we interviewed the fathers.16

It is possible that among the families who agreed to be observed, the mothers were unusually secure in their roles, did not have drug problems, and were generally less concerned about the possibility of being “turned in” to the state for being “bad” or “abusive” parents. Although some of the families (the Brindles especially) had a larger share of life problems than others, they all fell within the range of families we observed across the school sites. Still, with a nonrandom sample, one cannot generalize from these results to the broader population.

THE RESEARCHERS

Although it would have been my preference, it was impossible for me to do all of the fieldwork and interviews. I needed help. The first year, four students—three white women and one African American woman—assisted me. With me, these students interviewed parents in the study of eighty-eight families and conducted observations for more than half of the families: Brindle, Carroll, Driver, Handlon, Irwin, Tallinger, and Yanelli. At the end of the school year, when these students departed, I hired two sociology graduate students, an African American man and a white woman. During the summer of 1994, they observed the Taylor, McAllister, and Williams families. The last summer, 1995, four graduate students helped: an African American woman from the anthropology department, two white women from the sociology department (including the one who had worked on the project the previous summer), and a white man from the psychology department. These research assistants observed the Greeley and Marshall families and finished the observations of the Williams family. (See Table C9.)

As is a truism in ethnographic research, our own biographies influenced the research, especially my reasons for beginning the study and what we saw. At the time of the study, none of us had children. Frankly, part of my own motivation for undertaking the project was a long-standing desire to better understand the inner workings of families. As a child, I had longed to have a “normal” family. My parents’ unusual, even eccentric, characters made me attuned to variations in family life.17 Although my illusions regarding the existence of a normal family have since faded, my childhood experiences shaped the current study. In each of their children, my parents nurtured a love of reading, a sense of humor, a streak of unconventionality, and a pattern of persistence. I could not have persisted so doggedly with my efforts to recruit families for naturalistic observations without these qualities. The most important childhood legacy, however, was that I felt comfortable in families where there was yelling, drinking, emotional turmoil, and disciplining by hitting. This comfort with diverse family interactions turned out to be valuable.

Similarly, for the research assistants,