With the Unequal Childhoods participants, my efforts were rewarded. Some participants’ anger did diffuse over time. I continue to send cards and little gifts to the Yanellis, I give them big hugs whenever I see them, and they in turn greet me warmly.44 Others have been less forgiving. To expect forgiveness is to expect too much.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
In the appendix to his classic sociological study Street Corner Society, William F. Whyte describes the anger and sense of betrayal that many of the “boys” felt toward him after the publication of his book. “The trouble is, Bill, you caught people with their hair down,” one of the men tells him.45 The entire point of ethnography is to catch people in the routines of daily life, to reveal taken-for-granted aspects of their experience, and to make the background foreground. But researchers have often underestimated the level of anger and the sense of betrayal that can surface when they share their research results with participants. The dual process of seeking to reduce feelings of anger and pain while also accepting that such emotions may occur remains an enduring challenge.
CHAPTER 15
Unequal Childhoods
in Context
Results from a Quantitative Analysis
ANNETTE LAREAU, ELLIOT WEININGER,
DALTON CONLEY, AND MELISSA VELEZ
As social behavior shifts, new cultural forms arise. For example, many of the characteristics of the middle-class mothers described in the first edition of Unequal Childhoods had become so prevalent that as the research for that edition was underway, a new term—“soccer mom”—entered the national vocabulary. In addition to prompting the development of new terminology, changes in family life reverberate through the culture in other ways. In recent years, elaborate “mom organizer” calendars have flooded the marketplace. These calendars have columns available for entering each child’s schedule, color-coded schemes for keeping track of each family member’s commitments, and stickers representing (and differentiating among) children’s organized activities. Meanwhile, some recently published advice books now warn parents about the importance of scheduling free time for their children. Professionals caution against keeping children too busy.1 Cartoons that poke fun at contemporary family life are also a thriving industry. The Doonesbury cartoon strip reproduced here captures these broader cultural patterns that are an element of the study.
This chapter applies a more analytical approach to the broader context of Unequal Childhoods. Some readers of the first edition worried that the families described in the book might not be typical. I worried too. After the book was published, I carried out a research project with quantitatively skilled collaborators, who are the co-authors of this chapter, to investigate this issue. In that study, we used a quantitative analysis of a nationally representative sample to examine connections between social class and children’s time use, particularly organized activities. Those quantitative findings are summarized here. Because the quantitative investigation shifts the focus back to children, the summary does not follow smoothly from the discussions in Chapters 13 and 14, where young adults and their parents are the center of attention. Nevertheless, the quantitative work was important to carry out. In crucial ways, the quantitative findings corroborate the ethnographic data. As is often the case, however, there are also some interesting wrinkles that could lead to further research and reflection.
Doonesbury cartoon © 2003 by G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of Universal Uclick. All rights reserved.
Ethnographic studies like Unequal Childhoods look closely at real people as they go about their everyday lives. Ethnographers watch, listen, ask questions, and take notes as they join study participants in their daily activities. As the book reveals, gathering information this way requires a great deal of time, energy, and patience, so ethnographic researchers must limit their sample size. Some people find the results of ethnographic studies, including Unequal Childhoods, especially persuasive precisely because they draw on the carefully collected, intimate details of the social lives of a small number of carefully chosen people. Others, though, wonder whether such findings provide reliable information about people in generaclass="underline" what if the study participants are not typical?
The big-picture results achieved by analyzing data collected from surveys given to hundreds (or thousands) of people can—sometimes—help answer that question. But confirming findings from a small sample by undertaking a large-scale, representative survey is impractical. The costs would be overwhelming. Researchers usually have to rely on data that have been collected by someone else, for some other purpose. This is the case with our efforts to confirm the key conclusions of Unequal Childhoods.2 We turned to a nationally representative data set that is well regarded by social scientists: the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The PSID is a longitudinal data set containing information on a representative sample of families in the United States. It is known for having high-quality measures of economic and financial variables. A special module of the PSID, the Child Development Survey (CDS), contains detailed information on children who were part of PSID families in 1997—just a few years later than the original ethnographic data for Unequal Childhoods were collected. The CDS data on children can be linked to the economic and social information contained in the PSID, thus giving us a numbers-based, comprehensive window onto American family life. Our work draws on combined data of this type.3
The CDS is distinctive because it includes time diaries. These are lists of all the activities carried out by each child, from midnight to midnight (i.e., a 24-hour period), on a randomly chosen weekday and a randomly chosen weekend day. The diaries also include the starting and ending times of each activity. (Parents assisted their children in filling out the diaries, following careful instructions provided by the agency directing data collection.) Because the entries for each day must sum to 24 hours, time diaries are widely considered to be more accurate than questionnaire data. When people fill out questionnaires, they often overestimate how much time they normally spend doing activities that are considered socially desirable (exercising, for example, or reading). The structure of time diaries reduces this kind of inaccuracy.4
In conducting our analysis of the data, we began with a basic assumption, namely that children’s time diaries provide insight into what the children themselves do, as well as into their parents’ child-rearing strategies. Our analytical goal was to determine whether the PSID-CDS data exhibit patterns consistent with the concepts of concerted cultivation and natural growth reported in Unequal Childhoods. Therefore, using information on a subset of children in the CDS aged six to twelve, we constructed measures from the time diaries of the amount of time each child devoted to two key types of activities: organized activities and non-organized leisure (i.e., “hanging out”). We also measured the amount of time each child spent in the presence of extended kin. Each of these measures corresponds to a key finding from the ethnography. Once we had developed the measures, we looked to see what other characteristics of the sample they correlated with. For example, while we did not have a measure of occupational conditions available that conformed to the one used in the book, we did have various “proxy” measures—including family income, family wealth, and maternal educational attainment—which are often used by quantitative social scientists. As the ethnographic data in the first edition suggested, we found that each of these proxy measures is significantly associated with children’s time use. Children whose mothers have more education (i.e., middle-class children) spend more time in organized activities, less time hanging out, and less time with extended kin than children whose mothers have lower levels of education (i.e., working-class children). We obtained similar results for family income and wealth.