Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [251]
3. The PSID is a nationally representative longitudinal survey begun in 1968 with a focus on issues relating to household finances and employment. Annual or bi-annual waves of the survey have followed both the original sample families and the “breakaway” families formed by children of initial sample members. A weighting system has been devised to account for the effects of both the initial probability of being sampled and attrition (which is generally low) over time. Each wave of the PSID collects detailed information on the employment status, income, and finances of household members, as well as on related matters such as housing.
The CDS was first administered in 1997 to a subsample of PSID families with children between the ages of 0 and 12 years old. Data were collected on 3,563 children in 2,380 families. (Thus, two-thirds of these children are siblings of another child in the subsample, but no one family has more than two children in the study.) A set of child-level weights was created for use with these data by modifying the PSID weights to account for each child’s within-family probability of being sampled. These weights are used in our study. In order to maintain as much comparability as possible to the ethnography while simultaneously maximizing the number of cases available for analysis, we have restricted the subsample to children who were between the ages of 6 and 12 years old at the time of the data collection.
The PSID and CDS are collected and disseminated by the Survey Research Center, part of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.
4. Sandra L. Hofferth, “Response Bias in a Popular Indicator of Reading to Children,” for example, finds that in survey responses, highly educated parents (but not those with less education) appear to exaggerate the amount of time that their children spend reading, compared to time diary data on children’s reading patterns.
5. For the full results of these analyses, see the page for Unequal Childhoods at www.ucpress.edu.
6. These analyses include controls for the presence of relatives who reside in the focal child’s household and in his or her neighborhood.
AFTERWORD
1. Although I was able to contact most of the young adults, I did not connect with them all. For Harold, the information is based on my last contact in 2005. I did not attempt to reach Alexander; I confirmed his status via a website. As for the three young people in the intensive study but not featured in the book, Jessica Irwin graduated from college, married a policeman, and is now going to college to become an art therapist. Tara Carroll still hopes to return to community college, but she is working full-time as a caregiver in a home for disabled adults. I was unable to reach Karl Greeley; last I heard, he was working in a grocery store. He hoped to get his GED one day.
APPENDIX A
1. In retrospect, the decision to forgo interviewing the children was a serious mistake. I did, however, carry out “exit interviews” with children in the observation study.
2. See the work of Erik Olin Wright, especially his essay in the edited collection by John Hall, Reworking Class, as well as the work of Robert Erikson and John Goldthorpe, including The Constant Flux. Without artificially minimizing the divergences between Goldthorpe and Wright (the foremost of which is undoubtedly the latter’s insistence on retaining a capitalist class within his schema), it can be said that both use similar criteria (skills or credentials and authority) in drawing distinctions between categories of employees. For assistance with this discussion, I am grateful to Elliot Weininger.
3. See Frances Goldscheider and Linda Waite, New Families, No Families?
4. See Elliot Weininger and Annette Lareau, “Children’s Participation in Organized Activities and the Gender Dynamics of the ‘Time Bind.’”
5. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid.
6. Although I still see this choice as reasonable, it has drawbacks. It is hard to know whether poor or working-class families