Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data

Doing Qualitative Research

/pdf/social-capital-a-theory-of-social-structure-and-action-4m7poq6byy.pdf

Social capital: a theory of social structure and action

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. C. B. Stack. New York: Harper & Row. 1974. Carol Stack wrote one of the most powerful books of the last half century about African American families. The book's power derived from its focus on the stories and the lives of persons who were struggling to manage with limited resources and who had evolved seamless methods of survival and coping strategies. Stack was not content to view the problems of impoverished African American families from an outside perspective, as had been done in the past, but chose instead to present her work from the view of the participants. She presented a sensitive view of families that has not been duplicated to this day. Stack put specific emphasis on being accepted by the families before she began interviewing them. She and her son took a long time to be accepted by the families as they gradually became participants in the day-to-day lives of the "Flats." She was sensitive to the patterns of interactions among the networks of family and friends that would have been overlooked by almost any other researcher or method of observation. The book showed how a person from another racial and economic group was able, with skill, to become an intimate part of the experience and the lives of very poor families. Her anthropological approach stands in sharp contrast to the countless attempts of others to quickly go in and pull out slices of families' lives with a preexisting conceptual framework. The African American families of the Flats were presented as they were, not from a White academic theoretical perspective that was not based on reality. Stack made many observations that allowed one to see the intricate workings of the families that "outsiders" had not been documented before. Participants were allowed to make observations about their own families' patterns of interaction and to uncover truths of family functioning based on the reality of their lives. Important data on these second-generation urban dwellers are presented in such a calm manner that one could overlook their significance to the field. The impact of the economic pressures on the men and women in the African American community show how persons can have mainstream values but are prevented from achieving them because of the lack of employment and economic security within the community. In response to the reality, Stack found that African Americans have cooperated to produce an adaptive strategy of exchanging goods and trading resources, as well as offering child care or temporary fosterage. Kinship boundaries were more elastic than they were in more affluent families because these individuals immersed themselves in a domestic network of kinfolk and fictive kin, or those who became as kin. The participants in Stack's study moved around and had loyalties to more than one household grouping at a time, making their family networks unlike the "household" structures of most American families. These networks were diffused over several kin-based households that changed frequently. The usual method of arbitrarily specifying widely accepted definitions of the family as nuclear or matrilocal may block one from seeing the world as it exists in very poor communities. Stack's observations refuted the "culture of poverty" position that had seen African Americans as having no culture or totally negative qualities of family disorganization, personal disorganization, and fatalism. Unfortunately, too many current writings on African Americans still take these same positions. The views may be the result of ignorance, naivete, or complex levels of racism that insidiously make their way into present family literature. Stack continued to reflect on the poverty of the participants' situations. By doing so, she avoided another position that is all too common-assumption that all African American families are the same, regardless of their levels of poverty or affluence. …

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community

https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(14)61132-6.pdf

The health of homeless people in high-income countries: descriptive epidemiology, health consequences, and clinical and policy recommendations

This article presents data from the completed first wave of a multiwave comparative study of crime, danger, and informal social control that focuses on youth living in three high-crime neighborhoods in Philadelphia, PA (N= 147). The study is a purposive sample of delinquent and nondelinquent young men and women in one predominantly African-American, one predominantly Latino, and one predominantly white neighborhood, and researchers have completed in-depth interviews and self-reports with each subject. This article focuses on the narratives that youth living in high-crime neighborhoods build around their contact with police and the strategies the young people propose for crime reduction in their communities. The data illustrate that most youth in each neighborhood are negatively disposed toward police and that this is grounded in the lived experience of negative encounters with law enforcement. However, when youth expounded on what they thought would reduce crime, they overwhelmingly chose increased and tougher law enforcement. We analyze these findings to determine whether support exists for a subcultural approach or a cultural attenuation/procedural justice argument, and we explore the implications of our findings for community-based crime control.

/pdf/we-never-call-the-cops-and-here-is-why-a-qualitative-4mqgqw2y0g.pdf

We never call the cops and here is why: a qualitative examination of legal cynicism in three philadelphia neighborhoods*

Objectives. We estimated the incidence of homelessness during the transition to adulthood and identified the risk and protective factors that predict homelessness during this transition.Methods. Using data from the Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth, a longitudinal study of youths aging out of foster care in 3 Midwestern states, and a bounds approach, we estimated the cumulative percentage of youths who become homeless during the transition to adulthood. We also estimated a discrete time hazard model that predicted first reported episode of homelessness.Results. Youths aging out of foster care are at high risk for becoming homeless during the transition to adulthood. Between 31% and 46% of our study participants had been homeless at least once by age 26 years. Running away while in foster care, greater placement instability, being male, having a history of physical abuse, engaging in more delinquent behaviors, and having symptoms of a mental health disorder were associated ...

Homelessness During the Transition From Foster Care to Adulthood

Based on 424 qualitative interviews with a racially, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse population of young people ranging in age from 21 to 38, the authors ponder the paradox of the evolving role for contemporary marriage within the developmental perspective of the transition to adulthood. The authors identify two groups: marriage naturalists and marriage planners. Naturalists comprise one fifth of the sample, are largely from rural America, and follow the fast-track into marriage that defined the mid-twentieth century. Planners comprise the remainder of the sample, are based in metropolitan areas, and follow an elongated transition to adulthood. The authors examine the views of each group on commitment and the nature of relationships, and apply their findings to the debates about whether marriage is resilient, in decline, or becoming deinstitutionalized.

http://www.rhodeslab.org/files/New%20Meaning%20of%20Marriage.pdf

“Marriage Is More Than Being Together”: The Meaning of Marriage for Young Adults:

Baltimore entered the national spotlight in April 2015 with the death of Freddie Gray and the ensuing citywide protests. While The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood does not deal specifically with issues of police brutality, its focus on the urban disadvantaged in Baltimore feels particularly important given these recent events. This book is the culmination of over two decades of research by some of sociology’s most respected scholars. Utilizing a life course developmental perspective, the authors examine the long-term outcomes of the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP), a representative sample of Baltimore public school first-graders selected in the fall of 1982 and followed through 2006. A particular strength of the sample is the oversampling of poor whites. The existence and inclusion of poor and lower SES whites allows the researchers to examine racial differences within, and not simply across, socioeconomicstrata,a strategy that is often missing from studies of urban poverty. While the BSSYP study followed the children through high school, the authors fielded additional surveys after high school when the sample averaged age 22 (the Young Adult Survey, YAS) and 28 (the Mature Adult Survey, MAS). Sprinkled throughout the text are also short qualitative quotes used to illustrate some statistical points. The first chapter of the book introduces the reader to Baltimore, discusses the challenges facing the urban poor, and describes the study’s sampling and methods. The second chapter provides a relatively brief synopsis of Baltimore’s movement from ‘‘industrial boom’’ to ‘‘industrial bust.’’ While this narrative will be familiar to those with knowledge of the deindustrialization of Northeastern and Midwestern cities through the twentieth century, the authors do a particularly nice job of reminding readers that while these events might now seem to be in the distant past, they were crucial events in the life course of their sample’s parents. Chapters Three and Four focus on the early life of the BSSYP, paying specific attention to how family (Chapter 3) and neighborhood and school (Chapter 4) influence young people. Given that the research looks at these young people and their families in the early 1980s, much of what is discussed in these chapters should be familiar to readers. In Chapter Five, the authors move beyond the BSSYP and examine their sample’s transition into adulthood. The authors analyze four demographic markers: gaining employment, marrying (or partnering), moving out of the parental home, and becoming parents. They then identify the most common patterns of completion (or lack thereof) of these markers and the family background most often attached to these patterns. Those still reading this review carefully will notice educational completion is not included in the patterns discussed above. This is unique, as education has generally been treated as one of the ‘‘traditional’’ markers of the transition to adulthood by scholars. The authors argue that while the other transitions are clear-cut (that is, one clearly becomes a parent or does not), education does not have as finite an end and therefore is not included in these analyses. Instead, levels of education and employment (occupational status and earnings) are the socioeconomic destinations of the sample the authors focus on in Chapters Six through Eight. The authors find that baccalaureate completion by age 28 is particularly difficult for those from the lowest socioeconomic strata in the sample. There are also differences in employment by race and gender, a topic examined

The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

This study examines the experiences of 28 emerging adults (mean age = 22; 16 female, 12 male) who have aged out of the child welfare system in the United States. Findings derived from in-depth inte...

Laura Napolitano

Papers

We never call the cops and here is why: a qualitative examination of legal cynicism in three philadelphia neighborhoods*

Homelessness During the Transition From Foster Care to Adulthood

“Marriage Is More Than Being Together”: The Meaning of Marriage for Young Adults:

The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood

Transition to Adulthood of Former Foster Youth: Multilevel Challenges to the Help-Seeking Process