Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [248]
29. See, for example, the extensive literature on action research or advocacy research. This tradition has a more extensive following in the field of education than in sociology, although there are advocates in sociology as well. See Jack Whitehead and Jean McNiff, Action Research. Some researchers, including Nancy Scheper-Hughes, have called for avoiding the use of pseudonyms.
30. For example, Mitchell Duneier, in the appendix to his book Sidewalk, provides a comical description of his (vain) efforts to gain the attention and approval of the Greenwich Village street vendors he studied as he read aloud sections of the draft that involved them.
31. Some researchers have sought to resolve these questions by more directly privileging the voices of the respondents. Publishing portions of an unedited interview transcript is one approach. Others provide an analysis, but see a primary purpose of the piece as an opportunity to tell the stories of underrepresented groups. See, among others, Eddah Mutua Kombo, “Their Words, Actions, and Meaning.” Still, it was the researcher, not the respondent, who conceptualized the study, decided what questions to ask, and edited (most of) the transcript for publication. This also does not address the issue of the researcher’s career advancement. If a researcher genuinely shares control of the writing with respondents, then it will be harder to comply with the criteria for publication in peer-reviewed journals. Some ethnographers have retreated into the study of themselves, creating the subfield of autoethnography. See Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner, “Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography.” Others have engaged in community-based research. Alisa Lincoln reported, for example, a study where an ethnographer co-authored a piece with eighteen clients who had a major mental illness. The piece could not be published until every single co-author signed off. In some cases, the refusal of clients to approve a publication could harm a young scholar’s career (personal communication, January 27, 2011). See also Lassiter, Collaborative Ethnography.
32. Hugh Mehan commented, “I have been in similar situations—trying to depict events honestly while at the same time trying to ensure that the voices of the participants are rendered accurately. For our book [Mehan et al.,] Constructing School Success, I had promised the AVID folks access to the [manuscript] before publication. The AVID director reacted extremely negatively about certain points—which led to a succession of Friday afternoon sessions going over portions of the ms that she found offensive. We discussed. We argued. We settled on changes—ones that were not so volatile, but did not alter the argument. I made some acknowledgement of that situation in introductory material” (personal communication, August 31, 2009). Tim Black followed a similar approach for his book, When a Heart Turns Rock Solid. In a talk on his research on community organizers (which does not use pseudonyms), Mark Warren emphasizes the importance of building collaborative relationships with the groups he studies. This is not always easy, and sometimes the process of recruiting organizations to the study can be seen as “seduction” and the sharing of the results, especially when the results expose problems, as “betrayal.” He describes the interactions as “hot and heavy” with one organization, though it was much less contentious with other organizations. As he wrote, “Even in the more contentious cases, the team worked hard to reach some consensus on what was acceptable.” Personal communication, October 31, 2010. See Warren, “A Collaborative Approach to Ethnographic Case Study Research.”
33. See Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández’s Best of the Best for a thoughtful account of the experience of privilege in an elite boarding school. Gaztambide-Fernández offers insight regarding the experience of students, but his work contains little about the foibles, missteps, or inadequacies of the institution. He reports that was not deliberate, but rather “it reflects the fact that the book