RECRUITING THE FAMILIES
The classroom observations and interviews with parents were crucial in gaining access to families for the observation phase. Ms. Green’s third-grade classroom at Lower Richmond yielded seven of the twelve children: Brindle, Taylor, Irwin, Driver, Carroll, Yanelli, and McAllister. The fourth-grade classroom at Swan yielded two more: Tallinger and Handlon. Selecting the families involved a conscious, complicated calculus. The interview phase had helped identify certain kinds of experiences and family traits (especially the number of organized activities, the strength of kinship ties, and the depth of family-school relationships) as broadly characteristic of each social class. I wanted most of the families we observed to be as representative of these traits as possible. We tried to avoid selecting children whose parents were either unusually active in school or unusually quiet in their interactions with teachers. Among the middle-class families, we further limited the pool to only those with two parents in the home. Thus, in most cases, the research assistants and I had only three or four children per category to choose among.10
In making the final choices for the observational phase, I wanted to balance the sample by gender, race, and class. I wanted, as well, to look at children who, although from different races and social classes, shared key characteristics. For example, despite different class locations, some children shared church involvement, extended family nearby, or participation in organized activities. Overall, the research team and I tried to “mix and match” the children we chose in order to lessen the chance that differences in the behavior we observed were connected to some unknown variable such as parental involvement in the school.
I also sought “deviant cases.” In particular, I very much wanted to include a middle-class child who participated in no organized activities. I was unable to find a single such child among the families we interviewed, nor could Swan teachers or parents think of a possible candidate. I was more successful in finding deviant cases in terms of child-rearing strategies and family location, such as families with middle-class characteristics who live in working-class or poor neighborhoods. Two families offered this form of contrast. The Irwins, a deeply religious interracial family (white mother, Black father) whose household income and education levels put them between working class and middle class, lived in a working-class neighborhood. Their child-rearing strategies were dominated by the logic of the accomplishment of natural growth, but we also observed signs of concerted cultivation. The Greeleys were the other deviant case. Ms. Greeley, a white single mother with a live-in African American boyfriend, had been raised in a middle-class family. She developed a drug problem serious enough to cause her to temporarily lose custody of her children. At the time of the study, the Greeleys were living below the poverty level in a white working-class neighborhood. Despite her relatively privileged childhood, most of Ms. Greeley’s child-rearing strategies appeared to reflect her current class position: She followed the pattern of the accomplishment of natural growth. These two deviant cases suggest that social class may be more influential than neighborhood, but only a large representative sample could provide a solid basis for untangling these important issues.
Of the list the research assistants and I originally drew up, nine out of twelve families agreed to participate: both white middle-class families, all four of the working-class families, and three of the four poor families.11 The Black middle-class category was empty. The mothers at Swan school that I approached declined, citing issues of privacy. Although I was reluctant to go outside the pool of children from Swan and Lower Richmond, I didn’t have much choice. I turned to a racially diverse private school where an acquaintance’s children were enrolled. There, I made contact with the Williams family. By the spring of 1995, I lacked only a white poor boy and a Black middle-class girl. For the boy, I went back to Lower Richmond school area. A social services agency director in the region (whose name I got out of the phone book) referred me to the Greeleys.12 For the Black middle-class girl category, I tapped into a wide range of informal contacts before I found a willing family who met the criteria I cared most about. The girl, Stacey Marshall, was an appropriate age (ten), but she had already completed fifth grade and was entering sixth grade in the fall (when she would turn eleven). Feeling that it was better to be flexible on the child’s grade level than on the family’s race and class, I recruited the Marshalls.13 So, the final sample of families consisted of nine drawn from either Lower Richmond or Swan elementary school and three from other sources. Given the intrusive nature of home-based observations, I was very pleased with the overall response rate of 63 percent (I asked nineteen families to get twelve).
I found the process of recruiting the families very stressful. A number of people doubted that I would be able to do the field observations. They told me that families—especially families picked from schools rather than friends of friends—would never agree to participate. In most cases, my approach to recruitment was to send a letter and then follow up with a phone call. Before making the telephone calls, I would pace the floor anxiously and my heart would pound. Even when I had cleared that first hurdle, I continued to find the first encounters to secure written permission and to schedule the home visits scary. Nevertheless, I tried to appear upbeat, comfortable, and lighthearted in all of my conversations with the families. I stressed that unlike what television shows would have us believe, family life was quite difficult and that taking care of children was challenging. I explained that the research assistants and I were used to yelling and to messy rooms. I emphasized that I wanted to paint a realistic picture of family life, and I told stories of my own experiences growing up and fighting with my siblings.
Of course, no matter how persuasively I made my case, not all families agreed to participate. Some, in turning me down, explained, “We are not the perfect family.” Those who did agree often told us (in response to a question we posed in interviews at the end of the study) that they wanted to “help us out” and that the $350 we offered to help offset the inconvenience of the visits made participating more attractive.14 I believe the money made a decisive difference for most, but not all, of the families. Indeed, two families on public assistance who were asked to be in the study declined. My own assessment is that especially among the working-class and poor families, the children were strong allies. At the interview stage, I believe the fact that the children knew me and seemed to like me was a tremendous help in gaining parents’ cooperation.15 In addition, the parents had an extended period of time to get to know us before we asked them to be in the observational study. The process of recruiting parents for interviews and then conducting the interviews involved multiple contacts, including a call to confirm the night before. The interviews lasted from 90 to 120 minutes, and almost all were conducted in the participating families’ homes. As a thank-you we brought along a bakery pie and then mailed a handwritten thank-you note. Since we interviewed parents separately, we repeated the whole process in families where we interviewed the fathers.16