When I embarked on this research project in the fall of 2015, I was somewhat familiar with Nurturing Minds because I had previously worked for a non-profit organization in the same county for five years, and I had experience working with the same government entity that funded many of Nurturing Mind’s programs. The non-profit community in Elmwood is close-knit, and many employees from different organizations know each other through collaborative events and partnerships. This knowledge of the community afforded me some level of awareness in
knowing the scope of possibilities when it came to designing a local research project around parenting programs. Having an understanding of the organization’s role and interactions in the community was a benefit, to be sure. However, I was also a graduate student who needed a dissertation project, and I learned that Nurturing Minds was no stranger to students looking for internships or volunteer hours.
From the beginning I tried to be mindful of the possibilities for collaboration and the ways I might be able to be helpful to the organization, rather than just using them as a site for data collection. The anthropology department at the University of South Florida, where I am pursuing my degree, specializes in applied anthropology, which has long been considered an active and community-oriented type of anthropology because of its focus on applying academic knowledge to social problems that stem from human organization (Hale 2008). In the early stages of the project, in particular, I was heavily influenced by principles of engaged ethnography, which assert that the researcher has an obligation to collaborate with and provide meaningful input to the organizations or participants who serve as sources of their research, often with a goal of unveiling social injustice (Calhoun 2008; Goldstein 2012; Hale 2008; Low and Merry 2010). This approach ultimately became more watered down than I envisioned because, in the end, the
organization needed me much less than I needed them. Nonetheless, I kept the general theme of collaboration in mind throughout the project, with specific examples discussed in the following section. I also plan to make a career out of family studies in this community, and I foresee many of these interactions continuing into the future.
For this study, I used a methodology that centered around ethnography, although adapted somewhat to take into consideration the multi-sited nature of this research. The process relied heavily on participant observation in eight group settings and three homes, as well as 44 interviews with parents, employees, and funders. I also distributed an electronic questionnaire to parents (57 were completed) and analyzed two data sets that already existed within the organization, containing demographic and developmental assessment information about 3,623 participants. The following discussion outlines the strategies I used to access culturally embedded ideas about what parents think they should do to raise their children well, and what they feel is at stake if they do not adhere to professional ideologies of good parenting. In addition to describing the methods I used to collect data and the processes of analysis I utilized, I also include my personal and professional involvement with Nurturing Minds, as well as a discussion of my positionality as it relates to interactions with various actors and the way my status was integral in developing a research plan.
Ethnography and Parenting Studies: A Continuance
While there are a multitude of studies on the effectiveness of parenting programs and services from public health, psychology, and social work perspectives, these kinds of studies often lack the depth, historical context, and attention to personal perspectives that ethnography offers. Parenting practices are both implicit and explicit; while the explicit and intentional
strategies parents adopt may be easier to explain through interviews, the implicit
understandings that contribute to their ideas about raising children may require unmasking through other kinds of strategies that ethnographers frequently employ, like observation,
discussion of routines, and a genuine effort to learn the participant’s point of view (Bernheimer and Weisner 2007; Harkness and Super 2006; Weisner 2011a). Some anthropological studies from the last few decades emphasize the benefits of using ethnographic methods with family studies and serve as a rationale for using similar methodologies with this parenting study.
Thomas Weisner, through work with many different colleagues, has developed a tool called the Ecocultural Family Interview (EFI), which is designed specifically to guide researchers in having families “tell their stories” in accessible ways, allowing them to “generate the terms and categories in their own terms,” rather than having researchers assume certain models exist first (Bernheimer and Weisner 2007, 198; Weisner 1997; Weisner 2011a; Weisner 2014). He argues that this is crucial to understanding families in their own environments and responding to their own constraints, and that it is a way to understand parental goals for children outside the assumptions of the researcher (Weisner 1997). I referred to this protocol when developing my interview questions, specifically with regard to questions that ask about parents’ daily routines and struggles.
Sara Harkness and Charles Super have done numerous parenting studies through which they’ve developed the concept of parental ethnotheories: “…parental ethnotheories are often implicit, taken-for-granted ideas about the “natural” or “right” way to think or act, and they have strong motivational properties for parents” (Harkness and Super 2006, 62). As an
approach that draws from both anthropology and psychology, they also locate culture as emanating from the developmental niche, which takes into consideration several aspects of a child’s environment, including physical and social setting, childrearing practices, and beliefs of caregivers (Harkness and Super 2006; Super et al. 1996). This work offers a specific framing of why parenting beliefs are important in terms of child development and expressions of culture, and it provides direct tools for accessing that framework. These ideas were influential in the development of my questionnaire and interview questions, as well as in observations and
analysis, as they helped provide a multi-dimensional understanding of parenting that requires attention to individual, community, and structural factors.
And finally, my decision to use both qualitative and quantitative methods for studying parenting ideologies was partly influenced by a brand of cognitive and psychological
anthropology that often advocates for mixed methods ethnography (Bernheimer and Weisner 2007; Harkness and Super 2006; Lende 2009; Weisner 2011b). The quantitative data collection, especially with regard to this study, helps to provide a broader base for situating a more focused study of individuals and sites. And as Daniel Lende (2009) notes, “Ethnography helps provide a ‘why’ that quantitative methods often cannot address” (249). The two together are
complementary and each one helps to fill in gaps that the other cannot adequately address. A detailed explanation of the methods I used for this project is below.
An Evolving Methodology
I utilized a mixed-methods approach with an emphasis on ethnographic methods, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews with staff, parents, and funders, and a parent questionnaire. As I was building my relationship with Nurturing Minds, I asked if there was any data analysis I could help with during the off-weeks for play groups. Several staff had mentioned some new patterns they were noticing with a developmental assessment tool they used in all of the programs, so I offered to look at the data and do some comparisons by sites and demographic factors. This became a year-long project, during which I worked with representatives from different departments to gather the necessary data. Not only was this an opportunity for me to collaborate with Nurturing Minds on a different level, but this project provided an understanding of the organization’s “numbers,” or the number of children they served through each program and at each site, including basic demographic information. It was very useful in understanding the broad picture of participants served by Nurturing Minds.
As I became familiar with the multitude of sites and the breadth of services that Nurturing Minds offered, I realized that I would need to narrow the scope of study in a way that would satisfy my research questions while remaining within a realistic workload for a dissertation project. My main goal was to discover how parent participants and employees of the
organization understood what it meant to be a good parent. Because of the multi-site program and home visiting structure of the organization, the “field” for this study potentially included ten different sites and hundreds of individual homes spread across a large county–a scope that was clearly out of reach. All Nurturing Minds programs and partner sites describe their services as being intended for “families from a variety of neighborhoods” or families “from all walks of life,” yet it was unclear clear how or whether the organization explicitly addressed these differences. Several staff also described the organization’s programs as being for “any baby, any family,” or being “universal access.” But these statements seemed dubious to me–perhaps a sort of pretense that concealed the challenges of being relevant to diverse family backgrounds and needs. So through the qualitative components of the study, I planned to focus on how parents interpreted ideas of good parenting and whether there were differences in their interactions with the organization.
Many studies highlight discrepancies in how different individuals and families experience “expert” knowledge from family service programs, and not surprisingly, race, ethnicity, and class are some of the variables that may impact one’s interactions with programs (Coard et al. 2004; Johnson 2009; Perriera et al. 2006; Roche et al. 2007; Garner et al. 2014; Weaver et al. 2001). For instance, Romagnali and Wall (2012) have stressed that young, low-income mothers resist the idea of cognitive development philosophies and curricula, and feel that the expert point of view contrasts strongly with various parenting practices that are either culturally bound or restricted by resources. Laura Ruth Johnson (2009) critiques a family literacy and parent education program by showing how its widespread application may be inappropriate for some cultural groups outside the mainstream, such as the Chicago-based Puerto Rican mothers in
her study. Coard et al. (2004) explain that parent training programs are typically developed and evaluated with white, middle-class families, and do not acknowledge important practice of racial socialization that many African American families participate in with young children, and are therefore often seen as irrelevant. And finally, Roche et al. (2007) discuss the ways that parenting styles often differ by race, ethnicity, and gender, and can be further complicated by other factors such as neighborhood and risk factors. Because of this array of literature, I anticipated finding early on that some parents might have cultural conflicts with the advice or nature of the programs, and to that end, I planned to target locations and participants that represented distinct communities. Several of the community centers at which play groups and other Nurturing Minds programs were offered were strategically located in parts of the county where different ethnic or racial groups had a strong presence and which drew from a mix of lower and middle-income families.
For participant observation, I chose three sites of focus with different socioeconomic demographic patterns. The first is the main site, The Playroom, which is adjacent to the organization’s administrative offices, located in an affluent neighborhood with a majority white population5. This site is wholly owned and operated by Nurturing Minds, and it is one of the
hallmarks of the organization. For the second site I chose the Shelton Center–a community center in partnership with Nurturing Minds that is located near a lower-income community with a significant African American population (50 percent) ([Shelton] Crime and Civic Association Demographics 2010), although after beginning observations I found that a wide range of racial and ethnic backgrounds were represented at this site, most of which were not African American. The third site, the Azalea Center, is in a mixed-income area with a strong concentration of Latino families (50 percent) ([Azalea] Demographics 2013). These two centers were among several that were managed independently from Nurturing Minds but had steady funding for
5 It is difficult to find census information on this area but nearby schools list the population of white
Nurturing Minds programs and maintained a close working relationship with their staff. I hoped that the differences between these populations would provide meaningful contrasts to one another in terms of how parents understood what “good” parenting was, as well as in how they interacted with the program ideologies.
These sites served as the basis of my observations, which were conducted from January 2016 through February 2017. I began volunteering to assist with the playgroups as a simple and agreeable way to gain entrance into this realm of the organization’s work. I helped the facilitator of each group set up materials and activities, and I participated in the group along with everyone else. This usually entailed singing songs, playing instruments, and frequently sanitizing toys, passing out supplies, or cleaning up tables throughout the class. The cleaning was fairly
mindless and offered an ideal opportunity to observe, while the other activities offered a way for me to interact with parents and children and be seen as part of the group. I usually took notes reflecting on my time in the groups at the end of the day, and not during the classes. I did not want to appear as a distant judge, ever watchful of how parents spoke to, bonded with, and disciplined their children. At the end of the 6-session groups, I discussed my research project very briefly and handed out a flyer to recruit volunteers for semi-structured interviews. This turned out to be a very inefficient way of recruiting, as it only yielded four total participants from three play groups (out of 52 program participants from eight different play groups). But because the stand-alone community centers were more isolated from the administrative oversight of the programs, I thought it was important to make several attempts to understand the viewpoint of these particular parents, as they might experience the program differently from those who attend programs at the main site.
In order to draw from a larger pool of participants, I sent out an electronic questionnaire to two different groups of parents (see table 1 for a list of all research activities). One included parents who had participated in play groups in the past year (452) and the other included parents were currently receiving the monthly in-home education program, Side By Side (223).
The group consisting of play group participants was limited to those who had been to The Playroom only, as the organization did not keep contact information from parents who participated in their programs at stand-alone community centers. The questionnaire was administered via email by program administrators, along with a script I created to briefly introduce the study. The questionnaire content included open-ended responses to questions about parenting ideologies and resources; Likert-type questions about intensive parenting, parenting supports, and work/family balance; and demographic questions (see Appendix A). In addition to serving as a recruiting tool for parent interviews, the questionnaire allowed me to receive responses from parents who were not able to do an interview. The section on
demographics also included a question on household income, data which the organization does not consistently collect, but which is helpful in understanding the constituent base. Finally, the questionnaire allowed me to analyze responses in a more concrete and quantitative way, making it easier to see general patterns of responses and compare by various demographic factors.
Table 1. Research activities and number of participants
Research Activities Number of Participants
Parent Electronic Questionnaire–Side By Side 37 Parent Electronic Questionnaire–The Playroom 20
Employee Interviews 19
Parent Interviews 23
Funder Interviews 2
Side By Side In-Home Observations (3) 6
Play N Learn Observations (8) 52
Parenting Class Observation (1) 4
Questionnaire respondents were given the option of giving their contact information if they were interested in participating in an interview. I received 57 completed questionnaires back, 38 of whom indicated interest in being interviewed. Out of those 38 responses, 23 culminated in interviews. I realized with each whittling down of respondents that I would not
have a large enough sample to select ones that met any predefined criteria, such as race, ethnicity, income level, or area of town. In order to have a meaningful sample size, I chose to set up interviews with all respondents and then later determine the defining characteristics of the sample and how they would differ from my previous postulations. One challenge of doing exploratory ethnographic research is that some parts of the process unfold along the way. I knew that the organization served families all over the county, so I assumed the interviewees would live in disparate parts of the county. However, as I began confirming and conducting interviews, I noticed that most of the interviewees who did the in-home education program lived in one general area of the county (which happened to be on the opposite side of where I lived– sometimes up to a one-hour drive on expressways, to give an idea of the size of the county). It was also a different area than the three sites I had selected to observe play groups, so this added another dimension to my analysis in terms of understanding who was accessing parent education classes. Although I did not acquire the diverse sample I had hoped for, the
homogeneity of this group meant that I could delve into the ideologies of those who were representative of this sample–white, middle-class and wealthy moms who stay at home to raise their children or work very minimal hours. This changed the focus of my project from an
examination of cultural differences in perceptions of programs to an analysis of time and
intentionality among parents with adequate resources, issues I draw out more comprehensively in the following chapters.
I conducted interviews from November 2016 through April 2017, beginning with the in- home education parent group in the fall and moving on to the parents who attended play groups in the spring. Staff at multiple levels of responsibility at Nurturing Minds (17 total) were
interviewed throughout that time period as well (see table 2 for a list of employee interviews), and I also interviewed two employees of the major funding entities that supported Nurturing Minds. The parent interviews included questions on involvement with the organization and what they think about the programs, discussion of their daily routines with their children, and how they
utilize resources and support to influence their parenting ideas (see Appendix B). Employee interviews followed a similar path, with questions about their role and background, a description of their daily routine, questions about how programs are developed, a section asking for their professional ideas about what it means to do “good” parenting, and questions about their interactions with parents in their work (see Appendix C). Questions for funders were largely centered around the structural role of both funding bodies and family support organizations, as well as how decisions are made to award grants to parenting programs (see Appendix D).
Table 2. Employee interviews by role
Program and Role Number of Participants
Side By Side Parent Educator 7
Side By Side Supervisor 2
Side By Side Administrator 1
Play N Learn Facilitator 2
Play N Learn Supervisor 1
Play N Learn Administrator 1
Fatherhood Program Facilitator 3
Organization Administrator 2
Interviews were semi-structured, in that for each group, I asked the same basic
questions, but I also allowed respondents to elaborate or even move “off track” if they were so inclined. Interviews were a key part of understanding how parents and staff interpreted their daily work; they served as a means of actively conceptualizing what was otherwise taken for