For all children, the visits worked best as they became routinized. Overall, repeated visits just to “hang out” with the children worked well, going to their sports activities worked well, and going to church was relatively easy, as was going along on family outings. More unusual events (e.g., doctor visits, overnights) were more difficult because they were more disruptive.
Our experiences with the first families we observed taught us that we needed to develop an exit strategy. Leaving the field is no easier than entering it. We instituted pizza parties as a way of saying thank-you and good-bye. Pizza was a rare treat in the working-class and poor homes and the children looked forward to the party. They seemed to feel genuinely thanked by it. For the middle-class children (whose parents bought pizza so often that one father had memorized the local vendor’s telephone number), the party was not a special treat, and they did not seem to feel thanked by it.
Even after the study had formally ended, contact with the families continued. We did a few “mop up” visits, particularly doctor visits or special recitals, for most families. In the first year or two following the end of the project, I stopped in for brief visits with many of the families (most, but not all, encouraged the research assistants and me to come back for a visit “anytime”). I continue to stay in touch with the families (I did not, however, circulate the draft manuscript of this book among the families, although I will give them a copy of the book). Every year since the children were in fourth grade, I have sent them a Christmas card with a five-dollar bill tucked inside. I plan to reinterview the children as young adults.
DILEMMAS
It would be possible to write an entire book on the methodological dilemmas that emerged. I limit the focus here to the issue of differences in the extent to which the families understood the project and the problem of observation versus intervention.
Understanding us. We left it up to the parents to discuss the project with their children. In a play within a play, the concepts of concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth seemed to guide how the parents informed their children. In middle-class families, the project was presented as part of the children’s development, a kind of enrichment activity not so different from taking piano lessons or playing soccer. Middle-class children were allowed, even encouraged, to play a key role in the decision making. In the working-class and poor families, the parents did not solicit their children’s opinions; they simply told them that the family would be participating. Sometimes, even that information was not supplied until the day the research assistants and I arrived at the home to set up the schedule for the observations. For example, when we showed up at the McAllisters’ house, Harold’s mother, who had signed the parental consent forms earlier, without telling her son, explained the study to him this way:
She says, “A man is going to come tomorrow to interview you. You have to be here. Don’t dump him!” Harold doesn’t ask any questions.
The research assistants and I noted—and worried about the ethical implications of—evidence of a class difference in how much the families understood about the basic mission of the project. Many of the working-class and poor families had a truncated notion of who we were and what we were doing. For example, as I was completing an exit interview with Wendy Driver’s mother, I packed up my tape recorder and mentioned that I needed to go because I had to teach. Looking very surprised, she raised her eyebrows, and her voice, as she asked, “You teach? What grade do you teach?” Ms. Driver knew I worked at Temple University and had signed many consent forms, each of which listed me as an “Associate Professor.” Nevertheless, Wendy’s mother obviously had not formed any clear idea about my job. Middle-class parents, on the other hand, asked very detailed questions. Having been to college themselves, and having read books similar to this one, they asked me about the courses I taught at Temple, and some asked questions about other colleges in the area. Thus, despite many discussions of the study with families, many working-class and poor families maintained a limited understanding of the study, a pattern found by other ethnographers.21
The question of interventions. Problems surfaced when we were in situations that clashed with our own definitions of proper parenting, definitions which (as I noted above) varied across the team. It is one thing to believe, intellectually, as many do, that child-rearing practices are historically specific and that it is a mistake to valorize the practices of the middle class. It is quite another thing to be in the same intimate space with family members when different practices exist. (In some ways, it is comparable to the difference between being aware that automobile accidents and heart attacks happen all the time and actually being an eyewitness to one.) Further compounding the problem was the fact that as project leader I needed to both guide the research assistants and allow them the necessary autonomy to do what they thought was ethically and morally right in a given situation. These dilemmas were a constant source of tension in the project. In my view, both then and now, there are no easy answers. I often felt as if I was “between a rock and a hard place.”
I was deeply committed to the idea that the research assistants and I needed to approach the families with tremendous respect. My view was that it was their house, and that in raising their children, parents were doing the best they could. It was unacceptable for me or anyone on my research team to try to change them. This I took to be a moral issue, the “rock” that underlay the project.
Two other factors shaped my stance on intervening in family life. I wanted family members to trust and to feel comfortable around the research assistants and me. Criticism would not be helpful in building rapport. If anything, it would threaten it. Equally important, intervening to alter family dynamics would jeopardize the fundamental purpose of the study, which was to see how the families acted in their natural routines. Having a field-worker sitting smack in the middle of the living room was hardly “normal”; I certainly didn’t want to add yet more disruption. All of our efforts needed to be aimed at minimizing the influence of the study on family interaction.
The rule of thumb I followed, and instructed the research assistants to follow, was to “hang out” and not to intervene unless there was blood or an imminent threat of serious danger. I added one caveat: no research assistant was ever to do anything she or he felt really uncomfortable doing. When they were in the field, the final decision was theirs.
This firm commitment to respect the families and their practices did not make the observations easy. For example, when faced with bitter sibling rivalry, one field-worker wrote that “it was incredibly hard to resist the temptation to intervene and force [the child] back into his seat.” It was also sometimes painful to watch the way parents treated their children. In general, such occasions were rare, but in one family, the Brindles, difficult moments were nearly continuous. The family was under tremendous economic and psychological stress. It quickly became clear that I would need to do the home visits rather than have one of the research assistants do them.22
There were three occasions, however, in which scheduling conflicts resulted in another field-worker going to Katie Brindle’s home. Even in a brief visit (after school, from 1:45 P.M. to 4:20 P.M.), the interactions the researcher observed were emotionally draining: Katie methodically hit herself on the head; her aunt recounted—with approval—an episode from her own childhood in which her father beat her with a belt so badly that she bled. The field-worker summed up her feelings after the visit:
I hate going there. I hate it because I feel like I can never say what I think. For example, when Mary tells me how she should hit Katie, I just nod. I just sit and watch Katie hit her head, Melmel stick his finger in a plug, and CiCi scream at Katie. UUUGHHHH.
Fortunately, these family dynamics we observed among the Brindles were the exception. Indeed, most of the time the family visits were relatively easy, and even with the Brindles there were many relaxed and fun moments. Often we had fun “hanging out” with the kids, playing basketball and wall ball, watching te
levision, driving around in the car, or lying on the floor, talking. In a quirk of fate, we began the observational phase of the study with the Brindle family. All of the families that came after were much easier than they might have seemed had the research assistants and I not been so challenged at first.
FROM DATA TO A BOOK
The intellectual journey was not complete when we finished our visits with the families. In some ways, it had just begun.23 Because of the intensity of the research experience (as well as changes in my personal life), I followed the active period of field-work with a lull of reflection. Gradually, I began to analyze the data, mainly by reading, rereading, and reading again the field notes from the families (for each family, there was a chronologically arranged file of notes). For the interviews of the parents of the eighty-eight children, I coded the response data and then entered this information into a qualitative software program.24 For the twelve families, though, I proceeded the old-fashioned way: I read field notes, read the literature, talked to people, and reread the notes. I tried to link the bits and pieces of data to ideas; when the argument took shape, I looked for disconfirming evidence. In writing the book, I first considered organizing the chapters analytically, comparing all of the families with respect to one overarching theme. But ultimately, following the book The Second Shift by Arlie Hochschild, I chose to try to bring the families to life by devoting a separate chapter to each.25 I had begun the study interested in how children spend their time and in the nature of the interactions between families and institutions; those themes flourished in the book. Yet other, unexpected themes also emerged: particularly the role of language, the relative importance of kinship ties, the analogies of concerted cultivation and natural growth, and the limitations of social class in daily life.
Sometimes people ask me to name the most important thing that I learned from the study. I tell them that I discovered that all the families, despite their differences, felt safe and normal, after we had spent time together. They all felt like home. In addition, I was struck by how hard parents try, how much effort they put into each day as they pursue their lives; by the pleasures and frustrations the children experience in their daily routines; and by the challenges that all children face in growing up. Garrett Tallinger was resource rich compared to Harold McAllister, and yet Garrett had major disappointments in areas of his life that mattered to him, and Harold had some important life benefits that Garrett lacked, even as his family struggled economically. No child or adult has a smooth path in life: all have some share of pain and disappointment, as well as joy and rewards. Still, some paths are less rocky than others. Class position matters, every step of the way.
APPENDIX B
Theory: Understanding
the Work of Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu’s work provides a context for examining the impact of social class position. His model draws attention to conflict, change, and systemic inequality, and it highlights the fluid nature of the relationship between structure and agency.1 Bourdieu argues that individuals of different social locations are socialized differently.2 This socialization provides children, and later adults, with a sense of what is comfortable or what is natural (he terms this habitus). These background experiences also shape the amount and forms of resources (capital) individuals inherit and draw upon as they confront various institutional arrangements (fields) in the social world.3
Bourdieu is always attuned to power, especially the domination of powerful groups over scarce resources. He is interested in the power of individuals to define what constitutes a highly valued activity, but also to the reasons why particular social practices are valued more highly than others. Indeed, Bourdieu sees a pattern of domination and inequality at the heart of the social structure. His work suggests the importance of studying the strategies individuals use to maintain or improve their social position, as well as their children’s position. In any given society, the transmission of privilege is “mis-recognized.” Individuals tend to see their society’s social arrangements as legitimate. Status, privilege, and similar social rewards allegedly are “earned” by individuals; that is, they are perceived as resulting from intelligence, talent, effort, and other strategically displayed skills. Bourdieu, in showing how cultural capital is acquired and used in daily life, makes clear that individuals’ social position is not the result of personal attributes such as effort or intelligence. In particular, he argues that individuals in privileged social locations are advantaged in ways that are not a result of the intrinsic merit of their cultural experiences. Rather, cultural training in the home is awarded unequal value in dominant institutions because of the close compatibility between the standards of child rearing in privileged homes and the (arbitrary) standards proposed by these institutions.
To make this book more readable, I refrained from burdening it with Bourdieu’s terminology. Still, the book is a reasonably straightforward, if partial, empirical application of Bourdieu’s broader theoretical model. For example, in Distinction: A Social Critique on the Judgment of Taste as well as other works, Bourdieu clearly intends for habitus to be a set of internalized dispositions that operate in a large number of social spheres.4 In his discussion of habitus Bourdieu includes the preferences in food, furniture, music, makeup, books, and movies. The focus of Unequal Childhoods is much narrower, looking primarily at time use for children’s leisure activities, language use in the home, and interventions of adults in children’s institutional lives. Still, it is reasonable to assert that the elements discussed in this book, taken together, do constitute a set of dispositions that children learn, or habitus. Concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth are aspects of the habitus of the families discussed in this book.5
Bourdieu also points to nuanced class differences in the interactions between actors and institutions. He notes that people have a wide array of resources, social networks, and cultural training, and that they do not always use all of these resources in all settings. This sensitivity to the complexity and fluidity of social life makes his theory significantly more persuasive than other theories of social inequality, such as a culture of poverty model.6
Bourdieu builds his model using a (cumbersome) specialized vocabulary. The central concepts are the three mentioned above: habitus, field, and capital. The notion of habitus stresses the set of dispositions toward culture, society, and one’s future that the individual generally learns at home and then takes for granted. Bourdieu suggests that differences in habitus give individuals varying cultural skills, social connections, educational practices, and other cultural resources, which then can be translated into different forms of value (i.e., capital) as individuals move out into the world. It is possible to adopt new habits later in life, but these late-acquired dispositions lack the comfortable (natural) feel associated with those learned in childhood.
The concept of field is crucial. It encompasses some of the same dynamics captured in terms such as market or social institution. But, as David Swartz points out, Bourdieu also seeks something broader with the idea of field: “Bourdieu . . . sees the image of ‘field’ as superior to that of ‘institution’ for two reasons: first, he wants to emphasize the conflictual character of social life where the idea of institution suggests consensus; second, he wants a concept that can cover social worlds where practices are only weakly institutionalized and boundaries are not well established.”7
Bourdieu argues that in key areas, social space is stratified—some groups will be excluded and others included (and some will exclude themselves). He draws an analogy with a card game: there are fields that provide both the “rules of the game” and the social space wherein variations in capital exist. Bourdieu focuses on the intersection of the cards being dealt and the skill with which players play.8 He emphasizes that the nature of the game is arbitrary and the slots at the top are limited. He would never suggest, for example, that more parents could improve their children’s school success by adopting particular practices. Instead, he
would point out that the number of elite slots in society is limited. Thus, any effort to spread an elite practice to all members of the society would result in the practice being devalued and replaced by a different sorting mechanism. In this sense, his model suggests that inequality is a perpetual characteristic of social groups. In any given interaction, however, Bourdieu stresses that the outcome is uncertain. Strategies may not pay off. In addition, he notes that individuals with a similar set of resources may differ in the skill with which they use their capital.
Overall, Bourdieu’s work provides a dynamic model of structural inequality; it enables researchers to capture “moments” of cultural and social reproduction. To understand the character of these moments, researchers need to look at the contexts in which capital is situated, the efforts by individuals to activate their capital, the skill with which they do so, and the institutional response to the activation of resources. Unfortunately, Bourdieu’s empirical work has not paid sufficient attention to the difference between the possession of capital and the activation of capital.9 Nor has he focused attention on the crucial mediating role of individuals who serve as “gatekeepers” and decision makers in organizations. For example, in this book, in a few instances I have sought to show how parents transmitted different habitus in the home; how this habitus, in specific institutional encounters, functioned as a form of cultural capital; and how (depending on how it was activated) the cultural capital yielded (or didn’t yield) an educational profit. Ms. Marshall taught her daughter a set of dispositions in the home, including a disposition to challenge adults in positions of authority. Ms. Marshall drew on this disposition (habitus) and activated her cultural capital when Stacey was turned down from the gifted program. Through a shrewd activation of cultural capital, Ms. Marshall gained profits for her daughter, including access to the gifted program (which as an enriched curriculum might lead to higher test scores as well as more favorable placement in courses in the future). Ms. Marshall was able to obtain these results as a consequence of her disposition and capacity to intervene in institutional settings in which her daughters’ daily lives unfolded.
Unequal Childhoods Page 47