Interpretación de la información con muestra: 341

The data utilized in this study were collected in 2016 and 2017. I conducted in-depth, semistructured interviews with seventy-one parents in North Carolina who self-identified as having earned at least $3000 in gross monthly income for six months or more in the past two years, having struggled to pay a bill at some point in the past two years, and having at least one minor child.163

The study’s initial purposes were to better understand how parents who had struggled financially experienced and understood credit, credit reports, and credit scores, and to investigate the role of credit as a safety net more generally. I recruited families from two sources: local online school and parent resource groups and Legal Aid of North

163. Since I was particularly interested in the role of credit as it related to financial volatility of families with children, my goal was to interview parents who had struggled financially in the past two years, but who had also earned income well above the federal poverty line for at least a few months in the past two years. In 2016, a family of four who earned $36,375 was earning 150 percent of the federal poverty line. See DEP’T HEALTH &HUMAN SERVS.,2016 Federal Poverty Level Chart, https://www.parkviewmc.com/app/files/public/1484/2016-Poverty-Level-Chart.pdf [https://perma.cc/KX57-QGAH]. Monthly, such a family would earn $3,031. I rounded to $3,000 for ease and clarity. There was of course variation in the number of children each family had, and whether there was a second adult earner in the household, but the purpose of the study was not to create a strict sample based on income. Instead, the focus of the study was on how families with at least one parent who had worked at a job that paid well, relative to the poverty line, coped with financial emergencies. Thus, I conducted interviews with parents who had earned well above the federal poverty line (over $3,000 in a given month) at some point in time during the last two years (for at least 6 months), but who also had, despite these earnings, struggled to pay a bill in the past two years.

Carolina webinars, which contained a slide advertising this study. Once a family contacted me expressing interest in being part of the study, I conducted a screening call over the phone to ensure the family qualified for the study before conducting a full interview in-person. All but ten of the interviews were conducted in the respondents’ homes. The other ten interviews were conducted in alternate private and semiprivate spaces chosen to ensure the respondents felt comfortable discussing intimate aspects of their finances and personal lives. Each respondent received $40.00 for an approximately two-hour-long interview. At the beginning of each interview, respondents signed a consent form that, among other things, summarized the study and potential risks and benefits to the respondent, detailed the confidentiality measures taken to protect respondent identity, and allowed the interview to be recorded.164

The data are not meant to be representative, as I am not making quantitative claims about the commonality of the varying outcomes for families.165

We already know that the credit reporting system works such that those who borrow money they cannot pay back are penalized on their credit reports and scores. Qualitative data are not needed to verify this point—it is the mechanics of how credit scoring and reporting work. The contribution of the qualitative data, however, is to illustrate how existing functions of the credit system can interact with varying cultural adoptions of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility to create perverse incentives for financially struggling families similar to those welfare reformers were trying to combat. The data also illustrate how the existing safety net for financially struggling families does little to allow for independent financial resilience, another goal of welfare reformers and a goal many respondents articulated as important for themselves.

Indeed, in-depth interviews are particularly useful when

164. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of Duke University. In line with the requirements of the IRB and the confidentiality agreement that respondents signed, I made every effort to protect the identity of respondents. At the stage of initial contact, each respondent was assigned a unique identification number, which was included on their transcripts and data file. A name (not associated with the respondent’s actual name) was assigned to each unique code number to ease data presentation and eliminate potential confusion. I omitted potentially identifying information from all data presentation, such as exact addresses and exact places of employment. I also replaced actual names of family and friends with alternate names.

165. For more information about qualitative research methodology and sampling, seeMario Luis Small, ‘How Many Cases Do I Need?’: On Science and the Logic of Case Selection in Field- Based Research, 10 ETHNOGRAPHY 5, 24–27 (2009), and Lamont & White, supra note 30, at 10.

researchers are attempting to understand “the experience[s] of individuals within social contexts”166

and to include subjective experiences.167 _{In-depth interviews enable researchers to gather data}

about “the cultural understandings actors bring to social experience, interactions, and institutions.”168 _{The aim of the study and sampling}

strategy is to illuminate and understand rather than to predict or determine causation.169 _{This is the dominant strategy used among}

analytical sociologists.170

In qualitative analysis, presentation of exact numbers can lead to a false sense of precision of the data.171 _{Further, these percentages do}

not take into account the strength of people’s statements. Thus, in general, I refrained from reporting exact percentages or proportions of respondents because of the limitations and potential for misunderstanding such presentation of qualitative data can promote.

Accordingly, this Article primarily uses adjectives such as “most,” “many,” and “some” to convey the prevalence of a theme across interviews, rather than reporting exact percentages of prevalence.172

This Article uses the word “most” when the vast majority of respondents in a given group indicated a specific viewpoint or theme. The word “many” is used when roughly half of the group in question referred to a position or theme, and the word “some” when a theme or idea was not representative of a group as a whole but was shared by several people and thus suggested a potentially important pattern. All findings presented in this Article were supported by multiple respondents, and no outlier viewpoints are presented, unless indicated as such.

166. Lamont & White, supra note 30, at 10.

167. Id. (“Qualitative approaches allow for the inclusion of subjective experience and cultural sense making that play a vital role in understanding all facets of social life.”).

168. Id.

169. JULIET CORBIN & ANSELM STRAUSS, BASICS OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH: TECHNIQUES AND PROCEDURES FOR DEVELOPING GROUNDED THEORY 48, 159–60 (3d ed. 2008).

170. See Mario Luis Small, Causal Thinking and Ethnographic Research, 119 AM.J.SOC. 597, 599 (2013).

171. See SUSAN STURM & KINGA MAKOVI, FULL PARTICIPATION IN THE YALE LAW

JOURNAL 30 (2015), http://www.yalelawjournal.org/files/FullParticipationintheYaleLawJournal _e929dpx1.pdf [https://perma.cc/QT9F-R9BM].

B. Broken Bootstraps: When Self-Sufficiency Fails