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1. Homeschooling Mothers
- NYU Press
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>> 23 1 Homeschooling Mothers Because PATH served as a support group for more than 600 member families and its events were open to the public, I attended my first meeting assuming I would lurk anonymously to get a feel for the issues homeschoolers faced. But when I arrived and saw only a few dozen chairs set in a circle in the middle of the gymnasium, and a like number of people milling about, I knew I was not simply going to blend into the background. At 7:00 p.m., the moderator and longtime PATH president, Charlie Cooper , herded the group, mostly mothers, toward the circle of chairs. As we sat, he explained that the night’s goal was for people to share their experiences and insights, but first we would go around the circle with introductions. After eight people, it was my turn. “I don’t homeschool, and actually, I don’t even have kids,” I said after I gave my name. “I teach sociology at the university, and I wanted to find out more about homeschooling, so I came here tonight.” 24 > 25 Field Research Field research (also known as “participant observation” and “ethnography”) does not conform to the tenets of the deductive scientific approach, which assumes that people can be studied the same way as objects, by formulating hypotheses from established theories, then gathering data to support or refute the hypotheses. Such an approach assumes that there is an objective reality that exists outside of human experience; that the “facts” are out there waiting to be discovered by using a controlled and standardized procedure. While this deductive model is useful in answering certain questions, it would not have allowed me to answer the main questions I had: How do homeschoolers deal with the stigma of their unconventional choice and manage the increased workloads at home? Further, how do these things affect their identities as mothers? The answers depended largely on how homeschoolers made sense of their experiences and understood reality. People define reality based on their experiences in social life. We assign meaning to social processes and objects, including ourselves and others, then act on those meanings. One way to understand behavior, then, is to investigate the meaning people give to social phenomena. This is best accomplished through field research whereby researchers observe and interact with people in their natural settings and talk to them in depth.1 The data consist of researchers’ written observations, known as fieldnotes, and subjects’ detailed accounts of their experiences, solicited via in-depth interviews. There are several advantages of field research. First, it provides a deep and intricate understanding of how and why social processes happen because it captures the nuanced meanings people give to social phenomena; it uncovers the reality they create.2 The researcher can examine this reality not by imposing and defining it at the outset of the research but by allowing it to emerge from the data. Contrarily, surveys and experiments, though useful methods for answering some questions about social life, cannot access this depth of experience and therefore are not well suited to answer the questions about the meaning people give to their lives. Second, although field research does not produce findings that are generalizable to other social settings, it does allow the researcher to abstract general social principles and suggest where else they may be applicable, a quality termed “theoretical generalizability.”3 In this way, field research is inductive and produces tentative theories that may later be tested deductively to establish where, when, and how they may be counted on to explain other social phenomena. I conducted field research with homeschooling mothers because I wanted to explore specific aspects of their experiences: why they chose to 26 > 27 in the bathroom. I was struck by how Gretchen was continually moving throughout her day, preparing food and finding new activities for each child. The younger children, especially, required constant attention because each activity entertained them for only five minutes, and, as a nonmother, I was shocked and a bit panicked to learn that toddlers’ attention spans were so short. I could see that Gretchen was happy to have me there to relieve some of her burden—homeschooling motherhood was a lot of work, but she truly loved it. In contrast, I was exhausted and drained by the end of these visits. I walked away each time with a solid appreciation for homeschooling mothers’ intense and challenging work and knowing that when I did have children, I...