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By Root 1377 0

personal history was influential. For example, the disciplinary practices in the students’ childhood homes seemed to affect what each recorded in his or her field notes as noteworthy. Some field-workers with middle-class origins were upset by parents’ threats to “beat” children. A field-worker from a working-class family was not troubled by that, but he was shocked by the disrespect that many middle-class children used in routine interactions with their parents. A twenty-minute car ride with a whining middle-class four-year-old left this research assistant with a headache and a general feeling of disgust (“I wanted to kick his mother’s butt for letting him get away with that whining . . . Who’s the parent?”). Finally, over time, some researchers developed “favorite” families and some families developed “favorite” researchers.

Overall, however, the field notes taken by the different researchers were quite similar. I believe this resulted in part from the fact that some things were “striking” to all members of the team. I was deliberately heavy-handed, however, in my efforts to achieve intellectual integration. There were weekly meetings for the whole group and team meetings every week for everyone who was actively observing a family. I also had extended telephone conversations with the research assistants after many field visits and discussed with them at that time what they should write up in their field notes.

The field-workers found the study unusual and (usually) interesting. Like me, they enjoyed getting to know the families. Being in the field always involved a balancing act, though. We needed to be authentic, but we also needed to remain neutral. Sometimes little strategies helped. For example, when I was with families in which small children were often present (Brindle, Driver, McAllister, and Yanelli), I usually asked to hold the babies. I like to hold babies, but doing so in the field was also a way to help me blend into the setting. Other field-workers enjoyed playing basketball with the children or talking about music. Still, some aspects of the fieldwork necessarily required suppression of the self. I did not, for example, express my outrage over some parents’ political views; and I pretended to thoroughly enjoy all of the food I was offered, even things I intensely dislike. The research assistants were similarly self-monitoring.

All of us found the fieldwork emotionally exhausting. One of the graduate students summed up how taxing the observations were:

“I remember having this awful day during which I visited the McAllisters in the morning and the Tallingers in the afternoon; I got a horrible headache, was distraught for days, and was suddenly aware of how ambivalent I felt about class. . . . Every day there are poor people and comfortable people living in the same world, ignoring (or not seeing) each other and having wildly divergent experiences. But we generally don’t see this.”18

THE VISITS

The family observations all took place in 1994 and 1995. We learned to ritualize our entry into (and exit from) families. Often there were several telephone conversations and a face-to-face meeting with the parents before the family agreed. Then we would arrange a time to get together to sign consent forms and schedule home visits. For that meeting, two research assistants and I would go to the family’s home. We brought calendars (one for us and one, with refrigerator magnets, for the family) and a bakery cake along with us.

In that first meeting, we would work out mutually acceptable times for the observations (the visits lasted two or three hours) and decide which member of the research team would be in the home at what time. In scheduling the visits, we tried to include a range of time slots so that we could observe a variety of common events, such as before-school preparations and afternoon or evening homework sessions, dinner, Saturday morning activities, church (if applicable), a visit with relatives, a health-care visit, a family party, organized activities, and miscellaneous errands.19 In addition, we tried