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3 Studying How Families Cope with Poverty and Economic Stress: The Role of Quantitative and Qualitative Methods
Pages 27-44

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From page 27...
... Poverty and economic stress remain realities of daily life for a substantial proportion of American families and children. Recent increases in the number and proportions of families in poverty make imperative the need to understand how these families adapt to adversity.
From page 28...
... The context of low-wage work and its impacts on family functioning and child outcomes are particularly amenable to an approach that mixes quantitative and qualitative methods, said Rashmita Mistry, associate professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles. She described the Child and Family Study component of the evaluation of the New Hope Program.
From page 29...
... The first study Mistry described looked at patterns of income change and related those patterns to indicators of material and psychological well-being assessed at baseline and five years later; quarterly income data were available from 1995 to 2000, along with survey data. One important finding from the quantitative data analysis was that average total income changed little over those five years.
From page 30...
... LESSONS LEARNED FROM DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO STUDYING FAMILY PROCESSES AND CHILD OUTCOMES Rebekah Levine Coley, associate professor of applied and developmental psychology at Boston College, discussed the Three City Study, begun in the late 1990s to assess the well-being of children and families following
From page 31...
... The project team decided that this age group was particularly important in considering welfare reform, since it is an age at which parents can have particular difficulties combining parenting and employment. Very young children cannot report on their own well-being, so the EDS included four separate components: additional interviews with mothers, videotaped child-mother activities, interviews with biological fathers, and observations of child care practices and interviews with child care providers.
From page 32...
... For young children, information was obtained from such sources as direct assessments, structured observations, and parent and child care provider interviews. Adolescents were able to provide considerable information themselves, and the project interviewed adolescents directly as well as their caregivers.
From page 33...
... The Three City Study looked primarily at black and Hispanic families, but most measures in developmental psychology and related fields were developed for middleclass white families. The team spent more than a year piloting survey measures and structured observational measures to make sure that the measures were culturally appropriate and would work in the settings in which they were used.
From page 34...
... The measures we had in our survey of positive youth behaviors and positive parenting had such limited range that they are really not useful." Finally, there is a need for opportunities for more mutual influence among the components of a study. Coley suggested that program directors need to "try to increase as much as we can the mutual influence and communication between these components in a timely fashion." STRESS AND TRAUMA IN AMERICAN INDIAN FAMILIES Questions of meaning infuse research on families, said Paul Spicer, professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma.
From page 35...
... Stress and trauma are endemic in American Indian families. In recent epidemiological work by Spicer and his colleagues, rates of poverty in tribes were about 50 percent in the southwestern United States and about 60 percent among the Northern Plains tribes (Beals et al., 2005)
From page 36...
... Where dogs are treated poorly, children also seem to have great difficulties. Community engagement has become a core requirement of doing research with American Indians.
From page 37...
... These paired observations suggest disengagement in the context of stress and parents' experiences with poverty, substance abuse, mental health issues, and trauma but also emphasize the importance of developing messages that are consistent with cultural norms and expectations of infant care. Spicer and his colleagues regularly capture their visits on videotape and audiotape, even in the homes of families with very complex needs.
From page 38...
... But what distinguishes those who are able to stay quit from those who go back to drinking appears, in both the quantitative and qualitative work we have done, to be largely driven by involvement in spiritual traditions." KEY MEASUREMENT ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF LOW-INCOME FAMILIES AND SCHOOL READINESS Economic, psychological, and cognitive studies of reading have all demonstrated that early skills are extremely important for later achievement. In particular, the skills with which children begin kindergarten or first grade are highly predictive of their rates of growth over time and their acquisition of more advanced and sophisticated skills.
From page 39...
... Quantitative measures of parental teaching practices rely on a variety of assessments, such as the Home Literacy Environment (HLE) scales or the HOME-Cognitive Stimulation subscale (Bradley and Caldwell, 1984)
From page 40...
... Bachman also highlighted some of the qualitative and mixed-methods research that has identified socialization practices associated with high achievement among children from low-income backgrounds. For example, the Baltimore Early Childhood Project, which started in the early 1990s, followed 80 children and families either from their prekindergarten year to third grade or from first grade to third grade and periodically collected parent diaries, ecological inventories, interview data, and standardized child assessments.
From page 41...
... Particularly in some low-income or immigrant families, the teaching role traditionally ascribed to parents could actually be delegated to other members of the family. For example, one study looked at Indo-Chinese refugees with very low incomes and very low English fluency among parents or children when they moved to the United States (Caplan et al., 1992)
From page 42...
... There was also a concern about identifying people. For example, in the work on early childhood education, there was a concern about breaking down children's child care arrangements by Head Start centers versus other centers, because in many of the cities only a few Head Start centers participated in the ethnography.
From page 43...
... Some groups have gained more education, and attempts to disaggregate class and race could be fruitful, especially given the number of immigrant families in the United States. She was also interested in adding a qualitative dimension to her research, given that longitudinal surveys have generated lots of quantitative data.


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