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167 Appendix B: Interview Methods and Summary Description of Respondents I used a snowball sampling technique to select interview respondents. Beginning with contacts who work in three school systems in a suburban area in the northeastern United States, I asked for referrals to parents who might participate in interviews. I followed up the resulting interviews by asking respondents for referrals to other parents they know who might be willing to participate. Because the interviews resulting from the initial school contacts included very few working-class respondents, I then sought additional working-class respondents using my own personal networks, again enlarging the number of contacts using snowball sampling. This sampling technique resulted in interviews with twentytwo mothers and eight fathers, for a total of thirty interviews. All respondents filled out a short survey of demographic information . The interviews themselves were semistructured with open-ended questions asking how parents make decisions about childrearing, where parents seek and how they use childrearing advice, what kinds of social support they have for parenting, what differences they perceive in their own upbringing and how they are raising their children, how they think about children’s independence, and what challenges they face as parents. Interviews lasted between forty-nine and ninety-seven minutes, with most interviews lasting slightly more than one hour. I thanked respondents for their participation with a twenty-dollar gift certificate. All interviews were recorded and later transcribed verbatim for analysis. In analyzing the transcripts, I used the coding categories that emerged from the textual analysis of magazines (see Appendix A). Coding and analysis of interviews was assisted by the use of MAXQDA 2007. In order to investigate how parenting concerns change as children grow, I included parents with children of varying ages. All of the respondents have at least one child between the ages of two and sixteen living at home. Because most respondents have more than one child (most have two or three children), their children inclusively range in age from seven weeks to twenty-four years. Eighteen respondents are middleclass , and twelve are working-class. I defined respondents as middle-class if they have a bachelor’s degree and if either they or their spouse work in a profession that requires high-level educational certification or holds significant managerial authority over others. Middle-class respondents include attorneys, medical professionals, teachers, information technology specialists, and corporate analysts. I defined respondents as workingclass if either they or their spouse is employed in a position that does not require high-level educational certification and has little or no managerial authority. All working-class respondents had completed high school, and three had taken some college courses but did not hold degrees. They include mechanics, custodians, hairdressers, day care workers, and low-level white-collar workers. With one exception, the middle-class families own the homes they live in; half of the working-class families own homes, and the other half rent. Most of the respondents are married; four are single mothers. Nineteen respondents are white; eleven are racial/ ethnic minorities (seven black, three Hispanic, one Asian-American). Seventeen respondents are Protestant, six are Catholic, three are Jewish, and four claim no religious affiliation. The respondents range in age from thirty to fifty-seven, with a median age of forty-one. Of the mothers interviewed, half (eleven) work full-time in paid employment. Seven of the mothers interviewed are stay-at-home mothers, and another four describe themselves as the primary parent but work part-time in paid employment. Of the fathers interviewed, seven work full-time and one works part-time in paid employment. Six of the fathers I interviewed described themselves as equally sharing parenting decisions and tasks with their wives; two said that although they are involved with their children, their wife is the primary parent responsible for childrearing decisions. Two significant limitations of the interview data are the relatively small sample size and the oversampling of white, middle-class women. The women sampled do, however, resemble the market demographics for Parents and Good Housekeeping, the two magazines that make up the largest bulk of the data used in the textual analysis. A p p e n d i x B 168 ...

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