Adult Supervision Required: Private Freedom and Public Constraints for Parents and Children

Appendix A: Sampling and Coding Procedures for Magazine Texts

163 Appendix A: Sampling and Coding Procedures for Magazine Texts Sample 1: PARENTS Parents, first published in 1926, is the longest-running popular magazine targeted to American parents and is currently the best-selling magazine in its category, with a circulation of 2.2 million copies (Audit Bureau of Circulations 2009). Although the magazine has been continuously published since 1926, it has been published under seven different titles: Children: The Magazine for Parents (1926–1929), Children: The Parents’ Magazine (1929), The Parents’ Magazine (1929–1965), Parents’ Magazine and Better Homemaking (1966–1969), Parents’ Magazine and Better Family Living (1969–1977), Parents’ Magazine (1977–1978), and Parents (1979–present). For simplicity, I refer to it uniformly as Parents in the text, although bibliographic entries reflect the historical variations in the magazine’s title. Currently published by Meredith Corporation, Parents claims a readership of 15.3 million adults, with a median age of 33.8 and a median household income of $59,616 (Meredith Corporation 2009). Analysis of Parents is based on a systematic random sample of thirtyfour issues covering the years 1929 to 2006. I sampled two issues per year at five-year intervals beginning in 1926; from these years, I sampled the March and September issues, based on the use of a random numbers table for selection of months. (Because a full year was not published in 1926 and owing to limited availability of the earliest issues of the magazine , the March and September issues from 1929—the first year available in the Boston Public Library collection—were used in place of 1926.) From this sample of issues, all advice columns were analyzed. Advice columns have varied some over time, but I consistently found between three and six monthly advice columns in the magazine—some of these are Q&A columns in which reader-submitted questions are answered by “experts” (such as physicians, psychologists, or etiquette guides); some are lay advice columns in which readers offer practical suggestions, answers to published questions, or examples of how they solved their own problems (examples include “Everyday Problems,” “Pointers for Parents,” and “It Worked for Me”). In addition to advice columns, I read all editorial items and selected for analysis all items that included advice on child development, discipline, parenting methods, and family relationships. For example, although columns offering only recipes were not selected, articles about teaching table manners or the role of meals in family life, such as “The Many Meanings of Food” (1976) and “Don’t Make Your Child a Fussy Eater” (Russoto 1956) were selected for analysis. Similarly, features on back-to-school fashion that simply described clothing styles were not selected, but articles such as “Clashing over Clothes: ‘You’re Going to Wear That?!’” (Elkind 1991) were included for analysis. This yielded a data set of 390 texts, in which I treat each column or article as a single text. Sample 2: GOOD HOUSEKEEPING Good Housekeeping is a general interest women’s magazine with a current circulation of 4.6 million (Audit Bureau of Circulations 2010). Its publisher, Hearst Communications, claims 5.33 adult readers per copy, yielding a total readership of approximately 24.5 million. During its 125-year history, Good Housekeeping’s editorial coverage has varied, but has always included content on parenthood and children, and currently 38.4 percent of its readers have one or more children living in their household. The magazine currently devotes 3.3 percent of editorial content specifically to parenthood and children, but another 14.9 percent of editorial content devoted to health and self-help also frequently includes discussion of children and parenting roles (Hearst Communications 2010). The sample from Good Housekeeping consisted of two issues per year at five-year intervals, beginning in 1911 and ending in 2006. Again using a random numbers table I sampled the May and November issues. From these issues, I purposively selected all articles and advice columns relating to children and parenting roles. Because Good Housekeeping is a more general interest women’s magazine, only a portion of each issue’s texts related to childrearing; however, between three and six texts per issue were suitable for analysis, yielding a total sample of ninety texts. A p p e n d i x a 164 Sample 3: Other Popular Magazines In order to broaden the analysis, I drew a third, purposive and thematic sample of articles from a wider variety of magazines. Using the Readers’ Guide...