It is possible that among the families who agreed to be observed, the mothers were unusually secure in their roles, did not have drug problems, and were generally less concerned about the possibility of being “turned in” to the state for being “bad” or “abusive” parents. Although some of the families (the Brindles especially) had a larger share of life problems than others, they all fell within the range of families we observed across the school sites. Still, with a nonrandom sample, one cannot generalize from these results to the broader population.
THE RESEARCHERS
Although it would have been my preference, it was impossible for me to do all of the fieldwork and interviews. I needed help. The first year, four students—three white women and one African American woman—assisted me. With me, these students interviewed parents in the study of eighty-eight families and conducted observations for more than half of the families: Brindle, Carroll, Driver, Handlon, Irwin, Tallinger, and Yanelli. At the end of the school year, when these students departed, I hired two sociology graduate students, an African American man and a white woman. During the summer of 1994, they observed the Taylor, McAllister, and Williams families. The last summer, 1995, four graduate students helped: an African American woman from the anthropology department, two white women from the sociology department (including the one who had worked on the project the previous summer), and a white man from the psychology department. These research assistants observed the Greeley and Marshall families and finished the observations of the Williams family. (See Table C9.)
As is a truism in ethnographic research, our own biographies influenced the research, especially my reasons for beginning the study and what we saw. At the time of the study, none of us had children. Frankly, part of my own motivation for undertaking the project was a long-standing desire to better understand the inner workings of families. As a child, I had longed to have a “normal” family. My parents’ unusual, even eccentric, characters made me attuned to variations in family life.17 Although my illusions regarding the existence of a normal family have since faded, my childhood experiences shaped the current study. In each of their children, my parents nurtured a love of reading, a sense of humor, a streak of unconventionality, and a pattern of persistence. I could not have persisted so doggedly with my efforts to recruit families for naturalistic observations without these qualities. The most important childhood legacy, however, was that I felt comfortable in families where there was yelling, drinking, emotional turmoil, and disciplining by hitting. This comfort with diverse family interactions turned out to be valuable.
Similarly, for the research assistants, personal history was influential. For example, the disciplinary practices in the students’ childhood homes seemed to affect what each recorded in his or her field notes as noteworthy. Some field-workers with middle-class origins were upset by parents’ threats to “beat” children. A field-worker from a working-class family was not troubled by that, but he was shocked by the disrespect that many middle-class children used in routine interactions with their parents. A twenty-minute car ride with a whining middle-class four-year-old left this research assistant with a headache and a general feeling of disgust (“I wanted to kick his mother’s butt for letting him get away with that whining . . . Who’s the parent?”). Finally, over time, some researchers developed “favorite” families and some families developed “favorite” researchers.
Overall, however, the field notes taken by the different researchers were quite similar. I believe this resulted in part from the fact that some things were “striking” to all members of the team. I was deliberately heavy-handed, however, in my efforts to achieve intellectual integration. There were weekly meetings for the whole group and team meetings every week for everyone who was actively observing a family. I also had extended telephone conversations with the research assistants after many field visits and discussed with them at that time what they should write up in their field notes.
The field-workers found the study unusual and (usually) interesting. Like me, they enjoyed getting to know the families. Being in the field always involved a balancing act, though. We needed to be authentic, but we also needed to remain neutral. Sometimes little strategies helped. For example, when I was with families in which small children were often present (Brindle, Driver, McAllister, and Yanelli), I usually asked to hold the babies. I like to hold babies, but doing so in the field was also a way to help me blend into the setting. Other field-workers enjoyed playing basketball with the children or talking about music. Still, some aspects of the fieldwork necessarily required suppression of the self. I did not, for example, express my outrage over some parents’ political views; and I pretended to thoroughly enjoy all of the food I was offered, even things I intensely dislike. The research assistants were similarly self-monitoring.
All of us found the fieldwork emotionally exhausting. One of the graduate students summed up how taxing the observations were:
“I remember having this awful day during which I visited the McAllisters in the morning and the Tallingers in the afternoon; I got a horrible headache, was distraught for days, and was suddenly aware of how ambivalent I felt about class. . . . Every day there are poor people and comfortable people living in the same world, ignoring (or not seeing) each other and having wildly divergent experiences. But we generally don’t see this.”18
THE VISITS
The family observations all took place in 1994 and 1995. We learned to ritualize our entry into (and exit from) families. Often there were several telephone conversations and a face-to-face meeting with the parents before the family agreed. Then we would arrange a time to get together to sign consent forms and schedule home visits. For that meeting, two research assistants and I would go to the family’s home. We brought calendars (one for us and one, with refrigerator magnets, for the family) and a bakery cake along with us.
In that first meeting, we would work out mutually acceptable times for the observations (the visits lasted two or three hours) and decide which member of the research team would be in the home at what time. In scheduling the visits, we tried to include a range of time slots so that we could observe a variety of common events, such as before-school preparations and afternoon or evening homework sessions, dinner, Saturday morning activities, church (if applicable), a visit with relatives, a health-care visit, a family party, organized activities, and miscellaneous errands.19 In addition, we tried to schedule one overnight stay with each family. A typical pattern of visits might start with the field-worker arriving shortly after the child got home from school, hanging out through dinner, and then leaving. Other times, one of us might arrive at 6:30 in the morning to see what was involved in preparing a child for school; or we might meet the child at school to observe the family’s afternoon and evening schedule. We often carried tape recorders, especially after family members had gotten used to us.
All of the families considered the request to observe them odd. Mr. Tallinger summed up the majority view. Following up on the field-worker’s description of the research project as “unusual,” he said:
“Yeah, I know. It’s really unusual. The only people weirder than the people agreeing to be watched are the people who want to watch!”
The first few visits were very awkward. No one seemed quite sure what to do (including us). Not surprisingly, families felt the need to socialize with us, particularly during the first few minutes after we arrived. They asked us about our journey and almost always offered us soft drinks. The children, however, usually had something that they were doing or wanted to do. So, we often plopped down on the floor to watch television with them, or went outside to play ball. We also rode along in the car as parents and children went on errands. Family members got used to us. We found that the tension eased, particularly on the third day, and again on the tenth day. The children were young, so it was hard for them to sustain “company manners” for a relatively long period of time. We had the sense that normal family rhythms resumed over the course of our visits. Moreover, the key purpose of the study was to compare how different families organized their lives. There was no particular evidence that some families relaxed more than others on a systematic basis by class or race.