Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [222]
19. See Julia Wrigley, “Do Young Children Need Intellectual Stimulation?” and Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children.
20. As I explain in more detail in Appendix A, some of the families in the study, including the Williamses, were upper–middle class. The project, however, was hampered by its small sample size and my desire to compare different racial and ethnic groups. As a result, the differences between middle-class and upper-middle-class families are not a major focus of the work. Within the scope of the sample of thirty-six middle-class families, however, clear differences did not emerge between the middle class and upper–middle class. As a result, in this book I use only the term middle class to encompass both.
CHAPTER 2: SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND DAILY LIFE
1. William Kornblum, Sociology: The Central Questions, p. 72.
2. Jepperson defines an institution as “a social order or pattern that has attained a certain state or property . . . . Put another way, institutions are those social patterns that, when chronically reproduced, owe their survival to relatively self-activating social processes.” Ronald L. Jepperson, “Institutions, Institutional Effects, and Institutionalism,” p. 145.
3. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, p. 161.
4. Lower Richmond teachers also coordinate their classroom efforts with an after-school tutoring program that takes place at the local housing project, even though it is not a formal school-sponsored activity.
5. Most of the quotes reported in the book are from tape-recorded interviews or tape recordings made during family observations. At times, following traditional ethnographic work, the excerpts are from field notes that the research assistants and I wrote up immediately after the observations. In those instances, we added quotation marks only if we were certain that we could remember the exchange verbatim. As a result, there are excerpts from field notes that recount speech without the use of quotation marks. (I did not carry notebooks or permit others to write notes during field visits; rather we “hung out.”) In editing the quotes for readability I removed false starts, “um,” “you know,” “like,” and stuttering when they did not appear to be analytically significant. The signal of a . . . indicates the omission of words (or in a few cases a slight reordering of sentences). Finally, the research assistants and I had different nicknames for the family members that we used in our field notes (e.g., “Mr. Tallinger,” “Mr. T.” or “Don”). Rather than tamper with the text of field notes, I have allowed this variability to remain.
Brackets are used in the field notes to set off text inserted by me, usually for clarification, such as when a person’s name is used in place of a personal pronoun, or as a side comment I added during the writing of the book. Parentheses are used to show the field-worker’s side comments, which were inserted at the time the field notes were written.
6. For example, on a spelling test, a third-grader composed a sentence in which he said that he wanted to kill his teacher. This unusual incident generated considerable discussion in the hallways.
7. The average housing value at Swan was around $160,500 in the 1990 census compared to $75,000 in the Lower Richmond area. Compared