Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [252]
7. In addition, I made a donation of $100 to the school. In Lower Richmond the principal directed it to Ms. Green; at Swan it went to the Parent Association.
8. I began with Lower Richmond, but the method I used for selecting and recruiting interviewees was the same at both school sites. The content of the letters sent to parents at the two sites differed somewhat; for Lower Richmond parents, for example, I enclosed a photograph of their child taken (by me) during third grade.
9. Ten white poor families were recruited from welfare offices and other community programs. I paid these participants $25 per interview; none of the other families was paid.
10. We resisted the temptation to ask only those families who we thought, on the basis of the rapport established during the interview phase, would agree to be observed. We stuck by our first priority of recruiting the most representative families.
11. One white working-class and two Black poor families on welfare declined. The mother in the white family explained, “We’re not the perfect family.” One of the Black families objected to my request to have access to welfare records and declined for that reason. (I dropped the request after that.) The other Black family agreed but then dropped out after only a couple of days. The mother’s schedule changed frequently and there were indications of a possible problem with drugs within the family.
12. In some respects the Greeleys were not a typical poor family. They owned a car, for example. Still, they met enough of my basic criteria (e.g., they received various forms of public assistance, including medical coverage) to be included. Although the family lived in the same Lower Richmond neighborhood, they lived across a school boundary line and the son attended a different school.
13. This decision turned out to be problematic, however. A grade level can make a significant difference; Stacey seemed much more preteen than the other children we observed.
14. The payment was a lump sum (in cash), usually at the very end, when the intensive three weeks of field visits had been completed. In addition to offsetting some of the inconvenience to the families, the money was intended to compensate for expenses such as feeding the field-workers dinner. The amount offered meant something different to each family, depending on their income level.
15. A drawback to my having made friends with the children in their classroom was that some working-class and poor parents then assumed that I was affiliated with the school district. I worried this would increase their sense of distrust. In addition to assuring parents that all information was confidential, I made repeated efforts to clarify the fact that I worked at a college and was not in any way associated with the school district.
16. See Annette Lareau, “My Wife Can Tell Me Who I Know” for a discussion of problems in interviewing fathers.
17. My parents’ marriage was loving but cantankerous; there was a lot of yelling. There were other quirks, as well. My father worked for many years as a tutor, but there were also years when he did not work. This left my mother, who was a teacher, as the sole source of support for the family of four children. There were other ways that my family was seen as unusual: both my parents were atheists, my mother swore like a sailor, and my father had an unending series of broken-down cars he was always trying to fix.
18. I recorded similar feelings in my journal, noting that “. . . A two-site day is too much; it wears you out and doubles your field notes and makes your head spin with the contrast of [lack of] safety and opulence . . . [but to sustain the comparative character of the study] you need to have a two site (or really three site) day all of the time . . .”
19. We weren’t able to observe each of these events for