Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [215]
Two other factors shaped my stance on intervening in family life. I wanted family members to trust and to feel comfortable around the research assistants and me. Criticism would not be helpful in building rapport. If anything, it would threaten it. Equally important, intervening to alter family dynamics would jeopardize the fundamental purpose of the study, which was to see how the families acted in their natural routines. Having a field-worker sitting smack in the middle of the living room was hardly “normal”; I certainly didn’t want to add yet more disruption. All of our efforts needed to be aimed at minimizing the influence of the study on family interaction.
The rule of thumb I followed, and instructed the research assistants to follow, was to “hang out” and not to intervene unless there was blood or an imminent threat of serious danger. I added one caveat: no research assistant was ever to do anything she or he felt really uncomfortable doing. When they were in the field, the final decision was theirs.
This firm commitment to respect the families and their practices did not make the observations easy. For example, when faced with bitter sibling rivalry, one field-worker wrote that “it was incredibly hard to resist the temptation to intervene and force [the child] back into his seat.” It was also sometimes painful to watch the way parents treated their children. In general, such occasions were rare, but in one family, the Brindles, difficult moments were nearly continuous. The family was under tremendous economic and psychological stress. It quickly became clear that I would need to do the home visits rather than have one of the research assistants do them.22
There were three occasions, however, in which scheduling conflicts resulted in another field-worker going to Katie Brindle’s home. Even in a brief visit (after school, from 1:45 P.M. to 4:20 P.M.), the interactions the researcher observed were emotionally draining: Katie methodically hit herself on the head; her aunt recounted—with approval—an episode from her own childhood in which her father beat her with a belt so badly that she bled. The field-worker summed up her feelings after the visit:
I hate going there. I hate it because I feel like I can never say what I think. For example, when Mary tells me how she should hit Katie, I just nod. I just sit and watch Katie hit her head, Melmel stick his finger in a plug, and CiCi scream at Katie. UUUGHHHH.
Fortunately, these family dynamics we observed among the Brindles were the exception. Indeed, most of the time the family visits were relatively easy, and even with the Brindles there were many relaxed and fun moments. Often we had fun “hanging out” with the kids, playing basketball and wall ball, watching television, driving around in the car, or lying on the floor, talking. In a quirk of fate, we began the observational phase of the study with the Brindle family. All of the families that came after were much easier than they might have seemed had the research assistants and I not been so challenged at first.
FROM DATA TO A BOOK
The intellectual journey was not complete when we finished our visits with the families. In some ways, it had just begun.23 Because of the intensity of the research experience (as well as changes in my personal life), I followed the active period of field-work with a lull of reflection. Gradually, I began to analyze the data, mainly by reading, rereading, and reading again the field notes from the families (for each family, there was a chronologically arranged file of notes). For the interviews of the parents of the eighty-eight children, I coded the response data and then entered this information into