rewards and challenges of using ethnography in family research

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Rewards and Challenges of Using Ethnography in Family Research

Lara DescartesUniversity of Connecticut

Ethnography offers many potential benefits to family researchers, such as providing on-the-ground knowledge ofthe contexts that affect family functioning and processes. This article describes ethnographic methods and reviewshow they have been and may be used in family research, whether alone or in combination with more traditionalapproaches. The author’s fieldwork experiences are used to discuss some of the rewards and challenges of ethnog-raphy. The ways in which issues of personal identity and power may impact the relationship between the ethnog-rapher and research participants are examined. Also discussed are the ways in which contemporary constructionsof private and public space and time affect the ethnographic process. The goal of the article is to highlight the valueof ethnography to family research and to increase awareness of some of the factors to be considered while planningsuch work.

Keywords: ethnography; fieldwork; mixed methods; qualitative methods; research methods

Ethnography is a methodology for researchers interested in the “everyday”of family life—the interactions, processes, and environmental factors that indi-viduals and families experience as they go about their lives. Its premise is thattrying to see the world as the research participants do provides insight intotheir behaviors, beliefs, and values. Ethnography investigates actions in thecontext of their surroundings, the interplay of environment with behavior anddevelopment, and the meanings research participants make of phenomena.This focus on context and meaning brings a valuable perspective to familystudies. Daly (2003) argued that family theory has become distanced from thereal lives of real families. He noted that family theories tend to focus on whoma family is made up of, demographic characteristics, family roles, and so forthbut that the actual “experience of being family . . . is perhaps one of the mostelusive challenges . . . [it] is often so taken for granted, or so implicit as to beinvisible, both experientially and theoretically” (p. 773). Ethnography is

Author’s Note: The author was at the University of Michigan at the time this research was conducted.Funding for the project this article is based on was provided by the University of Michigan Center forthe Ethnography of Everyday Life, an Alfred P. Sloan Center for the Study of Working Families.Additional funding for article preparation was provided by the University of Connecticut. The authorwould like to thank Conrad P. Kottak, the principal investigator of the project, for the opportunity toparticipate in the research and for his feedback on this article. The author also would like to thank theanonymous reviewers and journal editors for their helpful comments, Mollie Callahan for her helpwith the fieldwork, and Ronald Sabatelli, Joanne Cunningham, Shannon Weaver, Brent Gibson, andFabienne Doucet for their thoughtful feedback. Lara Descartes is assistant professor, Department ofHuman Development and Family Studies, University of Connecticut.

Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal, Vol. 36, No. 1, September 2007 22-39DOI: 10.1177/1077727X07303488© 2007 American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences

Descartes / ETHNOGRAPHY IN FAMILY RESEARCH 23

uniquely suited to giving researchers insight into that taken-for-granted“being” aspect of family: how people experience being family and what mean-ing they make of being family. Furthermore, because of its focus on culture—the ways in which different groups of people learn to act and how to interprettheir experiences and environments (Spradley, 1980)—ethnography providesthe means to explore how people of varying identities may uniquely experi-ence aspects of being family. It might be expected that being African Americanor Euro American for example differently affects individuals’ circumstances ofand construction of meaning about family life, as might being female or male,adult or teen, middle or working class, and so forth.

Ethnography originated in the late 19th century, when anthropologists started toreject the then common practice of using secondhand accounts to analyze other cul-tures. They began traveling to fieldwork sites and living there, learning a group’s lan-guage and culture directly from them. At this time, anthropologists focusedprimarily on homogenous, nonindustrial societies. Soon however, social scientistsbegan to use ethnographic methods to study groups in their own societies.

Ethnography investigates social phenomena by putting the researcher in a“learning role” as he or she seeks to “show how social action in one world makessense from the point of view of another” (Agar, 1985, p. 12). To do this, there aretwo main methods. One is interviews, the goal of which is to elicit information onthe topics of interest and the meaning made of those phenomena by the researchparticipants (Spradley, 1979). Ethnographic interviews use open-ended questions,and the research participant is encouraged to talk about topics in depth. The sec-ond is participant observation, also called ethnographic observation. Here, theresearcher’s firsthand experiences in the everyday life of the group provide thecontent and focus of the research. The ethnographer spends time with the peoplehe or she is studying in their own environment and gradually gains increasingfamiliarity with the social context. This paired with direct observation of and par-ticipation in everyday activities provides insight into how members of the groupconceptualize what is taking place (Spradley, 1980). This can be a generativeprocess as the ethnographer often gains new and unexpected perspectives on aphenomenon through engaging in it. As Caughey (1982) put it, “Learning ‘how todo it’ not only greatly deepens one’s insight, it also raises all kinds of issues forfurther questioning” (p. 235).

Ethnography is best suited for exploring new topics, clarifying what is going onin a given situation, describing phenomena in a way that includes the participants’viewpoints, and generating hypotheses and theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Manyresearchers use ethnography as their sole methodology, but ethnographic methodscan be used in conjunction with other methods. Ethnography’s focus on the envi-ronmental and cultural milieu of family phenomena gives it the capacity to behelpful in explaining or giving depth to quantitative results. It can be useful priorto designing a survey or using a measure, for example, to make sure the items areappropriate to the topic and population and relevantly worded. Or it might beused after gathering survey data to flesh out or make sense of the quantitative find-ings. This use of ethnography to augment quantitative data can be labeled a combi-nation of methods (Moran-Ellis et al., 2006). Ethnography also can be integrated withquantitative methods. Here, different methods “are given equal weight, and . . .are orientated to a common goal or research question and are, therefore, necessar-ily interdependent” (Moran-Ellis et al., 2006, p. 52). Moran-Ellis et al. (2006) cited

24 FAMILY AND CONSUMER SCIENCES RESEARCH JOURNAL

Kelle (2001) as an example of integration. Kelle used quantitative data to provideevidence of structurally based gender bias in a workplace and a linked set of qual-itative data to show how the discrimination operated at the individual level.

All methods possess challenges in their operationalization, and ethnographicresearch is no different. One such challenge is that its intimate nature makes ques-tions of personal identity and power, both of the researcher and the research par-ticipant, particularly relevant to planning and carrying out projects. Also, thehome, where much of family life takes place, is considered a private domain in theUnited States. It is a site into which outsiders normally are allowed only undercontrolled conditions. Time itself is divided into insider- and outsider-appropriatesegments, with some periods, such as those directly before and after sleeping,usually thought of as private. An ethnographer interested in bedtime rituals forexample may have to first establish good rapport to obtain permission to be pre-sent at that time.

Ethnography thus is dependent on building relationships as the investigatoronly gains access to people’s lives if they choose to allow it. This can take time andis one reason that traditionally ethnographers immersed themselves at their field-work sites for periods of a year or more. That custom still continues in NorthAmerican research, with ethnographers often moving into a community andresiding there while they carry out their fieldwork (e.g., Zollar, 1985). Many how-ever have altered that pattern successfully, instead making intermittent visits withgroup members over time (e.g., Kugelmass, 1986). Some have performed ethno-graphic research that is designed to be brief, perhaps a few weeks or months induration. This is most typical of problem- or evaluation-oriented research, such asthat of Tilleczek (2004), whose study on youth driving culture involved only 40hours of participant observation. Another good example is that of Lightburn(1992), who spent three 8- to 12-hour days each with three families as she exploredhow they parented children with special needs.

There are different ways to go about recording ethnographic data, dependingof course on the research and its questions. Some fieldworkers audiotape discreteproceedings, such as interviews or celebrations. Some instead photograph orvideotape such events or set up video cameras in a specific setting, such as akitchen. The most common approach to producing records for analysis is throughwriting detailed field notes after every ethnographic encounter. These documentthe experiences of the fieldworker, including who was present during an activityor event, what happened, what group members said, how the ethnographer expe-rienced the situation, and so forth. Field notes also can include a more structuredcomponent, such as a log of how many times a parent held his or her child in theirarms or how many miles were driven in a day. Field notes can be coded by topicor theme for analysis (see e.g., Bernard, 1994), and there are software programs,such as AtlasTI, designed to do this.

This article explores ethnography and its potential for the study of Americanfamily life. One article however cannot go deeply into the details of planning, con-ducting, interpreting, and writing up ethnographic research. Examples of usefuloverview texts include Spradley (1979, 1980), Fetterman (1989), Hammersley andAtkinson (1995), and Agar (1996). Other works focus more specifically on analyz-ing, writing, and interpreting ethnographic studies (e.g., Atkinson, 1992; Coffey &Atkinson, 1996; Denzin, 1997; Goodall, 2000; Hammersley, 1991; Jacobson, 1991;Van Maanen, 1988; Wolcott, 1990). Of particular interest to family researchers may


be the edited volume by Gilgun, Daly, and Handel (1992) on using qualitativemethods in family research and that of Jessor, Colby, and Shweder (1996) onethnography and human development.

I turn next to a discussion of how ethnography has been used in familyresearch. I then use an ethnographic study on which I worked to highlight vari-ous issues that are relevant to planning such projects. I address some of the chal-lenges I encountered in my fieldwork, such as conventions of private and publicspace and time, and consider if and how I resolved them.

FAMILY RESEARCH ETHNOGRAPHIES

Most recent research in the family sciences has been quantitative, but there isincreasing interest in qualitative work (Emery & Lloyd, 2001). In the 2000 decadereview of the Journal of Marriage and Family, a number of articles called for greateruse of qualitative methods (e.g., Furstenberg, 2000), including ethnographic. Thefew areas in which there has been ethnographic research highlight what themethodology can bring to studying families. One of these is community and fam-ily. Its history of ethnographic study reaches back to the beginning of the 20thcentury, when University of Chicago sociologist R. E. Park had students engage inlocal participant observation (Tuchman, 1977). Wirth (1928), one of these students,conducted fieldwork in a Jewish neighborhood and produced one of the first ofthese ethnographies. Other early American ethnographic research that addressedcommunity and diverse aspects of family life include Whyte (1943/1981) andHollingshead (1961).

The majority of work conducted since then has been with minority racial/ethnic families, especially African American. Many of these explored the use ofinformal support exchange networks to cope with economic hardship. Two of theearliest are Rainwater (1970) and Stack (1974). Both are typical of subsequentresearch in depicting the strength of minority families and the ways they can serveas buffers against harsh conditions. With their on-the-ground depictions of therealities of families’ lives amid challenging environments, these ethnographiesexpanded on quantitatively based knowledge of African American families. As anexample, Moynihan (1965) reported a higher rate of mother-headed familiesamong Blacks than Whites and concluded that this was a cause and symptom ofdysfunction. Stack’s ethnographic research however showed that although Blackhouseholds might be headed by single mothers, fathers frequently were involvedin their children’s lives in consistent and supportive ways. Her descriptions ofhow men and women worked to maintain their families in the face of poverty andinequality gave a new context for understanding African American families.

Subsequent ethnographies covering similar themes include Aschenbrenner(1975), Kennedy (1980), Zollar (1985), Jarrett (1992), and Pattillo-McCoy (2000).Comparable research has been conducted in Latino (e.g., Menjivar, 2000; Sharff,1998) and Asian American communities (e.g., Kibria, 1993; Min, 1998). These lat-ter works reveal a trend of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with immigrantpopulations. Much of this literature is focused on exploring how individuals andfamilies adjust to the challenges of life in the United States and how culture influ-ences that process.


Work and family is another area in family research in which ethnographic meth-ods have been used comparatively frequently. This trend took off withHochschild’s (1989) classic text on dual-income couples’ division of houseworkand has continued. Ethnographic research brought to work and family literature afirst-person sense of how families get through their days and also illuminated howmen and women conceptualize their roles at work and home. Sample topicsinclude the meaning of motherhood and work to women (Garey, 1999), meaning offatherhood and work to men (Townsend, 2002), philosophies of child rearing(Lareau, 2003), and women coping with the work and family conflicts broughtabout by the Personal Responsibility Act (Hays, 2003).

Community and family and work and family thus are two areas in which ethno-graphic methods have helped illuminate the functioning and meaning-making ofindividuals and families within their social and cultural contexts. Ethnography hascontributed to other topics in family research, such as adolescents’ developmentalpathways. As with community and family studies, much of this work has beendone with minority populations (e.g., Burton, Obeidallah, & Allison, 1996; Kaplan,1997; Sullivan, 1989; Williams, 1991), but some exceptions may be found in Eckert(1989) and the edited volume of Phelan, Davidson, and Yu (1998). These explorehow youth from various class backgrounds experience their social worlds. Someethnographers have conducted fieldwork on various aspects of children’s social-ization (Christensen, 1993; Corsaro, 1996; McGuffey & Rich, 1999; Thorne, 1993).Ethnography also has added to understanding parent–child interactions (e.g.,Taylor, 1983) and children’s development in the context of the school–parent inter-face, such as Lareau (1989), Delgado-Gaitan (1990), and Valdes′ (1996).

The ethnographic research discussed previously sought to explain the phenom-ena under study through giving on-the-ground perspectives and in so doing, gen-erated hypotheses and theories about family processes in specific environmentaland cultural contexts. Most were not integrated methodologically, where, as definedby Moran-Ellis et al. (2006), that would indicate two methods being given roughlyequal emphasis in the research process. Many however did combine methods. Mostcombined ethnographic observation with interviews and less frequently with moretraditional instruments such as questionnaires and time use diaries. Our own pro-ject, discussed next, is an example of integrating ethnographic methods. Wedesigned a study that explored the role of media in the everyday lives of familiesthrough individual interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic observation.

OUR RESEARCH: A CASE STUDY OF THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF ETHNOGRAPHY

The primary goal of our research was to understand if and how middle-classparents of young children used media messages on work and family as theythought through their own decisions about careers and child rearing. To achievethat goal we wanted to know about parents’ backgrounds, what their daily liveswere like, how they had made their work and family choices, what media theyconsumed, and how they felt about and experienced work, family, and media. Theprincipal investigator (PI) was anthropologist Conrad Kottak. I was a graduatestudent when this 2-year study began, and my role was to orchestrate and conduct


the fieldwork. A non–Hispanic White (hereafter White), middle-class woman, atthe time of the research I was in my early 30s, single, and childless.

Individual Interviews

To explore parents’ perspectives on their work and family lives, we began withindividual interviews. We accessed parents of young children by working througha school system in a town near our home university. This school was chosenbecause it was the first we contacted that was interested in participating. We lim-ited our sample to parents of first and second graders to obtain relative consistencyin the types of child care issues facing parents. The principal selected 5 of the 10first-grade classes and 5 of the 10 second-grade classes according to her sense ofwhich teachers would be willing to help. We sent home mailings to the 250 totalstudents’ parents explaining the research and requesting their participation in anindividual interview. Half of the letters asked for an interview with a mother andhalf with a father. In all, 36 parents, of whom 8 were men, agreed to be interviewed.All but 2 of the 36 were married, and all but 1 was White. Nearly all of the familieswere middle-class, where we defined that broadly as owning a home, having a col-lege education, and having a wage earner in a professional position.

Our interview guide was comprised of open-ended questions asking aboutparents’ work and family configurations and daily paid labor and child care routines.More structured items asked about form, frequency, and content of media consump-tion, including television, movies, radio, Internet, magazines, and other print mater-ial. I conducted all of the interviews. Most were an hour and a half long and wereaudio tape recorded. Data from the structured portions of the interviews were orga-nized tabularly to facilitate easy comparison. Data entry forms were created that hadspace for each family member’s daily schedules and different types of media intake,for example. Material from the open-ended responses was transcribed verbatim.

Focus Groups

The second method we used in our research was focus groups. Focus groupsallow multiple participants to interact with each other, exchanging thoughts andbuilding off of one another’s observations. Their group nature can bring out a widerange of conversational dynamics, such as teasing and banter, that may reveal dif-ferent facets of the topic under discussion (Kitzinger, 1995). Kitzinger (1995) statedthat this method is “appropriate when the interviewer has a series of open endedquestions and wishes to encourage research participants to explore the issues ofimportance to them, in their own vocabulary, generating their own questions andpursuing their own priorities” (¶4). When framed in this way, focus group dataarguably can be considered ethnographic.

We used our individual interview guide as the template for writing our focusgroup interview guide. The difference between the two lay mainly in that the morestructured part of our interview guide, in which we asked for data on parents’ workschedules and media consumption, was not included in the focus group guide. Suchdetailed questions would not have been practical in a focus group format. Werecruited participants by posting notices throughout the town where the schoolwith which we initially worked was located. In all, 46 parents, 14 men and 32women, participated in a total of eight groups. Of the 46, 4 were divorced or single.


All but 2 were White. The majority were parents of young children, and nearly allwere middle-class. Five of the focus groups were comoderated by the PI and me,and I moderated three alone. Focus groups were audio tape recorded and the tapeswere transcribed verbatim. The software program AtlasTI was used to manage thetranscriptions and to organize the data.

Ethnographic Observation

The individual interviews and focus groups were just the beginning of ourresearch. We knew the information they provided would be useful but that theywould not capture the detail and social context of media use in which we also wereinterested. We thus asked all of the parents we interviewed individually and in thefocus groups if they were willing to participate in ethnographic observation. In all,12 women signed up for this stage. Because I had conducted all of the individualinterviews and moderated or comoderated all of the focus groups, all but 1 of thewomen knew me from at least one meeting. The 12th signed up because herhusband had been interviewed and she thought the experience would be interest-ing. I feel this “foot in the door” approach was useful: The prior encounter estab-lished some familiarity that likely made my presence a somewhat less unsettlingprospect than it might have been.

All of the 12 initial ethnographic observation participants were mothers of atleast one child in elementary school. Of the 12, 11 were White, middle-class, andmarried. The 12th, a single mother, was struggling explicitly to enter the middleclass. I spent time with 9 of these families (due to the constraints of finishing mydissertation, another graduate student worked with the remaining 3). Becauseethnography is such an intimate experience, we had parents direct the form andlength of the visits. They invited me to come at a time and day they deemed con-venient, and I stayed as long as they wanted to have me there. If they wished toinvite me to come again, they did. If they did not volunteer an invitation, I did notpress. The minimum time I spent on one visit was 3 hours, and the maximum was12. Of the 12, 3 families only invited me to come for one session, and 6 had mecome for two or more. The maximum was five. Because visits were at the parents’convenience, time with any one family was spread out, in periods of up to a year.

When I spent time with mothers, children usually were present and sometimesthe women’s husbands. I engaged in the activities the families did, accompanyingthe women as they went through their days. I rode in their vehicles as they trans-ported their children between home and school, volunteered in the schools, went tosoccer games, folded laundry, watched videos, ate meals, read to children, and soon. I thus was a participant in families’ daily routines but also an observer. As I fol-lowed parents through their days, I paid attention to the media they watched, read,and listened to. This allowed me to be exposed to the same work and family mediacontent as the research participants and to observe in which situations these mes-sages emerged, how frequently parents were exposed to them, if and how muchattention they paid to this content, and if and how they discussed it with others. Bybeing present and participating in families’ daily routines, I simultaneously gainedinsight into how media actually were used, such as to relax while folding laundryor to entertain a child while a parent fixed dinner, and a more immediate sense ofhow parents actually balanced work and family responsibilities.


Earlier it was mentioned that ethnography may give researchers experiencesand observations not anticipated by or even in the scope of their original theoret-ical framework. This can provide the opportunity to generate new avenues of pro-ductive thought and analysis. In our own project this occurred as I realized howmuch of the time in my visits with families was in cars, SUVs, and minivans.Parents spent numerous hours per week driving their children to and from schooland extracurricular activities as well as getting themselves back and forth fromtheir paid employment. This observation along with other knowledge gainedthrough my physical presence in the community, such as road conditions, proce-dures for picking up and dropping off children at school, limited local offerings ofchildren’s extracurricular offerings, and the scarcity of nearby professional jobs,provided material for an analysis we did not foresee: one of how place as well asclass and gender intersect in framing parents’ work and family lives (Descartes,Kottak, & Kelly, 2007).

No recording devices were used during the ethnographic observation sessions.I followed the convention of writing up detailed notes after each visit, includinginformation such as exactly what happened during my time with the family, whatwas said, who had been present, what the surroundings were, what I perceivedthe mood to be, how I had felt about the events and interactions, and so forth.

Multiple Methods: Integrated Data

Each method we used provided different kinds of information that contributedto our final analyses. Our analytic approach was similar to that of Moran-Ellis et al. (2006), who also had multiple data sets generated via several methods. Theycalled their strategy “following a thread”: “We picked an analytic question ortheme in one dataset and followed it across the others (the thread) to create a con-stellation of findings which can be used to generate a multi-faceted picture of thephenomenon” (p. 54). To illustrate, I will discuss an example from our researchregarding the radio advice show of Dr. Laura Schlesinger, colloquially known asDr. Laura. Dr. Laura is a conservative host who strongly advocates traditionalfamily configurations in which one parent stays home full-time.

The individual interviews produced easily categorized and comparable data.We were able to determine for instance what percentage of parents in our samplelistened to Dr. Laura’s radio talk show program, what work and family contentthey recalled hearing in it, and what men as opposed to women thought of thatcontent. In response to open-ended questions, several interviewees also gaveaccounts of what Dr. Laura meant to them and how they used her advice. Forexample, some women who had withdrawn from the workforce to care for theirchildren spoke of how they appreciated Dr. Laura’s public support for decisionslike theirs. A few talked about how feeling supported in that way gave themstrength to defend their choices when they felt they were being challenged, assome had, by spouses, family members, or neighbors.

Focus groups gave a different type of information as participants engaged indialogue, building off of one another’s utterances. Such interchanges allowed usto hear more detail than we tended to get in the individual interviews. Oneperson’s comments would lead another to react or to recall something and chimein. Conversations about Dr. Laura usually were animated, full of humor, and wenton at length. They allowed us to see where the group came to consensus, usually


on disapproving of Dr. Laura’s brusque manner, and where it did not, usually onthe utility and appropriateness of Dr. Laura’s advice, giving us insight into cul-tural norms about gender, work, and family.

Finally, ethnographic observation gave us a first-person sense of how peopleactually listened to and used Dr. Laura’s broadcasts. A number of parents tunedin to Dr. Laura regularly. By spending time with some of them, I was able toobserve their interest in different parts of the program and to listen firsthand toDr. Laura’s prescriptions about work and family. I then was able to hear parentscomment to me or to others present about aspects of this advice with which theyagreed and why. This frequently led to discussions of their own work and familychoices, with some explicitly linking messages in Dr. Laura’s program to theirown decisions. Being present for the media consumption itself thus turned broadrecollections such as “I like what Dr. Laura has to say about being a stay-homemom” into much more detailed data.

As an example, I spent time with Pam, a mother of three who stays home nearlyfull-time. Pam told me in an interview how much she valued Dr. Laura. HearingPam talk about Dr. Laura in this way provided one kind of data, letting me knowthat she liked the program and appreciated Dr. Laura’s messages on the impor-tance of staying home with young children. This information gave clues aboutPam’s values and how Dr. Laura’s messages might support her worldview. But Igot a much more detailed and immediate picture of how Pam used Dr. Laura tomake sense of her own life while being with Pam in her home during multiple vis-its. It was then I saw the regularity with which Pam tuned into Dr. Laura, thedegree of interest certain types of calls and not others generated, and the com-ments Pam made about various bits of Dr. Laura’s advice. I also was present whenPam and her husband, Clay, engaged in dialogue during Dr. Laura’s program. Atone point for example, Dr. Laura told a story about her son asking her to notremarry if anything ever happened to Dr. Laura’s husband. Pam expressed thatshe was very much moved by this story. Clay however wryly commented that Dr. Laura’s husband might have been expected to ask for a divorce when reportscame out about nude photos of her. Being there for this interplay and others pro-vided a nuanced picture of how Dr. Laura’s messages were used to constructmeaning in their home about what it is to be moral, how best to raise children, andwhat appropriate gender and family roles are. Ethnographic observation pro-vided insight into the cultural processes at work in Pam and Clay’s home.

Our final analysis of how research participants listened to and interpreted Dr. Laura drew on information from the individual interviews, focus group inter-views, and ethnographic observation, weaving them together to provide the typeof multifaceted picture described by Moran-Ellis et al. (2006). Some of what wediscussed was who listened to the program and who did not, what different typesof people reported that they got out of the content, which elements of Dr. Laurawere found funny and/or offensive and why, and how Dr. Laura was actually lis-tened to and used as a site for clarifying values in individuals’ everyday lives.

ISSUES OF POWER, IDENTITY, AND REPRESENTATION

As ethnography is dependent on the relationship between researcher andresearched, issues of power, identity, and representation are important to consider


in every stage of the process. To illustrate, I will discuss some of the challenges Iexperienced during fieldwork.

As noted earlier, ethnography originally was associated with the study of small,homogeneous societies. This trend continues today, among anthropologists in par-ticular. A researcher working with such a population frequently brings resources tothe encounter to help facilitate rapport. There are thus incentives for a group’smembers to answer questions and allow the researcher’s participation in daily rou-tines. These resources might be food or medicine or less tangible commodities,such as the ability to read and write or useful contacts. Access to such resources ofcourse is indicative of a power difference between the ethnographer and researchparticipant. This is not to imply that informants (the term anthropologists use todescribe a research participant, meant to lend a connotation of active subjectivityto the role) have no power in the ethnographic relationship but that there may beinequalities in the degrees and kinds of power. This disparity carries over into therealm of the academic voice. After fieldwork ends, researchers return to their homeinstitutions and publish materials about their experiences in the field. In so doing,they create default roles for themselves as experts on the group of study, with theauthority to speak about, describe, and analyze it (considerations of authority,power, and responsibility in the ethnographic context are to be found in a numberof works, e.g., Agar, 1996; Behar & Gordon, 1995; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Marcus& Fischer, 1986). Some ethnographers do ask informants for their input on the dataand analyses, but even so, the final authority lies with the researcher. An increas-ingly literate and electronically connected world means that even members of non-industrial societies may have access to the materials written about them and maybe able to critique them publicly (see e.g., Lee & Ackerman, 1994). This however isrelatively uncommon, as are instances where members of nonindustrial societieshave the resources to themselves become voices of academic authority. The powerof representation thus tends to lie in the hands of a nonnative researcher.

Even when ethnographic work is undertaken in industrial and postindustrialsocieties, including the United States, the balance of power still has tended toreside with the researcher. This has reflected the structural constraints shaping thelives of the population under study, most frequently a group in some way mar-ginalized from the mainstream. Some cases were cited earlier: The majority ofrecent studies conducted with family in the community context have been con-ducted with African Americans or other minorities. Other examples include theAppalachian poor (Anglin, 2002; Halperin, 1990), American Indians (Gongaware,2003; Grobsmith, 1981; O’Nell, 1996), and people impacted by substance abuse(Agar, 1977; Young, Friedman, & Case, 2005). Thus, the researcher, not always butfrequently from a middle-class background, carries class privilege to the ethno-graphic experience and often race privilege as well. Additional authority is vestedby the academic institution he or she represents. All of these factors, whether theresearcher wishes it or not, likely affect the research participants’ interpretation ofthe legitimacy of the ethnographer’s presence, questions, and written products.

Our study on work, family, and media however did not take place among a mar-ginalized group, much less in a nonindustrial society. It was undertaken in Dexter,a middle-class White town in the Midwestern United States. Dexter was originallya community characterized by farming and small industry, but it has expandedrapidly in the past 10 years. It is a picturesque spot within an hour’s drive of twomajor universities and a number of colleges and hospitals. It is also within com-muting distance of industry and government centers. The public schools are good


and crime is negligible. These factors have made it a popular spot for White middle-class relocation far from congested suburban areas. Sprawling subdivisionsnow are peppered through the countryside around the central village. The homesin those developments are large and expensive. Many professional families havemoved into those new residences, and it was this population that made up themajority of our research participants. In many ways the sample was quite homoge-nous. The most noteworthy demographic difference between families was whetherthe women worked full-time or not.

These research participants hence were very different than those most fre-quently included in ethnographic observation work, and my relationships withthem were somewhat atypical. The “privilege gap” was lessened dramatically.Uniformly White and well educated, our informants were much like me. I had nomaterial resources to give them in return for their participation in the project thatthey did not already have. Our topic was of much more interest to us than to them,so I could not even articulate any unvoiced concerns in a way that might lead tofuture benefit. Indeed, a number of our informants expressed incredulity that wewere taking media messages on work and family as seriously as we were for someof them really could not see any significance to the topic. The primary resources Ihad to give likely were my companionship and status as an extra adult to help outwith the children and around the home.1 Of the 12 female ethnographic observa-tion participants, 11 did not work full-time, in contrast to 38 of the 60 total femaleinterview and focus group participants. It seems likely that who volunteered tohave me come into their homes related to their available time during the day andthe comparative desirability of adult company. A second benefit to participating inthe study may have been simply taking part in a study sponsored by a local uni-versity. Our interest in the particulars of mothers’ everyday lives may have beenflattering in and of itself, even if they did not think our topic of research was impor-tant. When I was with women in public, a few introduced me as their friend, butthe majority explained that I was a researcher.

My identity and role as the principal fieldworker also undoubtedly impacted theresearch process. A graduate student during most of the fieldwork, I was markedlyfinancially less well off than all of the families with whom I conducted research. Ialso was single, childless, and younger than most of the participating parents. Itherefore carried far fewer status markers than did most of the informants. Such asituation frequently also holds true for young ethnographers in nonindustrial soci-eties, where having a spouse, children, and advanced age all may be crucial ele-ments in cultural measures of power and authority. Fieldworkers in these situationshowever often tell of being able to escape some of the effects of having few claimsto locally defined status simply by being outsiders. This gives them the leeway ofbeing judged by different standards. Female ethnographers relate for example gain-ing access to men’s ceremonies normally forbidden to women (e.g., Caplan, 1993).In our work however, other than the (admittedly perhaps substantial) status con-veyed by my university affiliation, there were few extenuating factors to excuse mefrom normative expectations governing relations between Americans of differingsocial standings. An example of a possible site of resultant dissonance arises fromnorms governing social intercourse. As a rule, married couples with children social-ize either with family or with friends who also are married with children. It is notcommon for a single, childless woman to spend a lot of time with a married coupleunless she is related to them. This did seem to cause some discomfort for men inparticular. One evening, for example, as I accompanied a family to their son’s


hockey practice, their daughter grabbed my hand as we walked across the parkinglot. She then took her father’s hand on her other side and swung between us. Hermother walked behind. The child’s father seemed uncomfortable at being pairedwith me in this familial-like configuration and released his daughter’s hand wellbefore we joined the crowd inside the building. Another example of potential dis-sonance is that as a byproduct of participating in the research, our informants gavea person differing in social standing from themselves the license to analyze andwrite about their lives. Handing over such authority to people lower in status thanone’s self can result in discomfort. Some of the parents upon meeting me did ques-tion my degree of experience and seemed reassured when they found out that thestudy was headed by the PI, an older, male faculty member.

There were positive aspects to my identity as defined by my childlessness how-ever. There may have been more careful explanations by female informants as theydescribed the issues they had considered in making their decisions about balancingwork and family. Most of the original individual interview participants and all ofthe nine families with whom I engaged in ethnographic observation asked aboutmy family and thus knew that I had no children. This difference between them andme more than likely elicited greater detail than might have been offered had I beena mother. In such a case the informant might have assumed shared common groundand offered less explication of their individual situations, feelings, and choices.Another possible benefit relates to the fact that I, an employed woman, was work-ing with a number of stay-home mothers. Generally speaking, these women werecommitted passionately to their choice to leave the paid labor force, and many hadlearned to be wary of the judgments of working mothers. If I had been a mother, andhence by default a working mother, this might have resulted in perceptions ofgreater threat by these informants. Such a situation more than likely would havebeen deleterious to the research relationship.

Our research bore yet one more unique challenge related to the middle-classstanding of the informants: that of being almost immediately open to their scrutiny,personal interpretations, and potentially their voices. Most of the parents had com-puters at work and/or at home. They thus were able to log on to the university-sponsored Web site where we provided links to the working papers generatedthroughout the 2-year fieldwork period. Research participants hence were able toread exactly what we were saying about them while we still were engaged inresearch. The papers of course obscured personal identities with aliases, but thedescriptive details would have made self-identification easy. Although few actuallycommented on the written products, this was another reminder of the realities ofethnographic research in the contemporary United States, and I did feel some inhi-bition in expression. As a member of the same cultural group as our informants, Iwas well aware of how interpretations of values, attitudes, and behaviors could beconstrued as disrespectful or patronizing even if they were not meant to be, and I didnot wish to hurt our informants or seem ungrateful for the time they had given us.

SPACE AND TIME: PRIVATE AND PUBLIC

In contrast to many nonindustrial societies, in the United States, much of familylife takes place in the home, quite specifically in seclusion from outsiders. Evenextended kin typically are not a regular part of a family’s home environment. Few


in the United States have the agency to enact these ideologies of space as the Whitemiddle and upper-middle classes. Generally speaking, the higher a person’ssocioeconomic status, the greater control they have over the incursion of outsidersinto private space. Dexter’s rapid growth itself is symptomatic of this middle-classdrive to maintain clear boundaries delineating home and family from the largercommunity. The acres of agricultural fields predating the housing developmentsallowed the construction of not only large homes but expansive yards and long dri-veways. Many of our informants had chosen to purchase such homes. They thuswere by definition people who had sought out the privacy of personal spaces con-tained within clearly bounded zones in which to live their family lives. Theseparents’ norms governing family and privacy may have been disrupted by havinga relative stranger spend extended periods of time in the family home. This prob-ably at least in part explains the low assent rate to our requests for ethnographicobservation. As mentioned, most of those who did sign up for this stage of theresearch were stay-home mothers. The appeal of adult company during the daymay have overridden any desire to keep family life separate and private. Eventhose families that did agree to participate however evinced some initial discom-fort over roles and boundaries. One man for example called his wife during ourfirst session to see how it was going and to remind her of his instructions to notgive out any financial information to me.

This work also faced challenges connected to the American construction ofgender, space, and time. The home still is construed as women’s domain (Nippert-Eng, 1995), and men’s role in the home is still seen as one of protection and defensefrom the outside world (Andrews, Luckey, Bolden, Whiting-Fickling, & Lind,2004). Men did not in general seem eager to give me access to their homes andfamilies. Most of the people who responded to the requests for interviews and laterparticipant observation were mothers, although half of the initial contact lettersasked specifically for fathers. When some of these women did consent to my pres-ence in the home, their husbands frequently seemed ill at ease, even after multiplevisits. One man’s position was that it was fine to have me spend time with the fam-ily during the day as long as I was gone by the time he got home from work. Thisinjunction remained in place despite a number of visits and increasing intimacybetween his wife and me. This father provides an example that underscores howtime itself is marked into private and public domains and how it too can becomean arena of gendered significance with all the concomitant power relationships.

Another challenge to the fieldwork was presented by the relationship of time toour focus on the interconnections of work, family, and media. Media use is anamorphous phenomenon. A television may be on at any time of the day in con-junction with a number of activities, such as eating, doing laundry, or changing adiaper. A radio may be background noise while driving or while cleaning house. Amagazine may be browsed while in bed or while waiting in a doctor’s office. Totruly get a sense of how people use media and what messages are being transmit-ted and received necessitates spending significant time with informants. It is a tru-ism however that time has become commodified in American society. A number ofstudies over the past few decades have demonstrated the time crunch for middle-class families, our research population (e.g., Arendell, 2000; Hochschild, 1989,1997). Time is conceptualized as carrying value, and the scarcer it is, the more precious it becomes. Giving up nonwork time to people who are neither family nor friends may seem senseless. This may be a partial explanation as to why


ethnographic observation with the White middle class is conducted so infrequently.This is a group we can expect to be invested in hegemonic ideologies of private andpublic as they apply to time as well as space. Spending time thought of as privatewith nonfamily may be a transgression of norms. Even considering such an optionmay be alien to many ethnographers, themselves frequently White and middleclass. Indeed, although the White middle class has been well researched in familystudies, they have not frequently been investigated ethnographically. As noted,minority groups instead are those most often included in such work.

Further complicating our own fieldwork was the fact that much media con-sumption takes place during periods of the day defined as especially private fam-ily times, such as right before going to sleep and immediately upon waking. Mostof my access to families was granted for the more public daylight hours, and Irarely was able to spend time with informants in the more intimate times of daywhen nonfamily normally are excluded from the home. In fact, the only familywho readily agreed to participate in the project in this way was headed by a singlemother, who had no husband with whom to negotiate her decision. Otherwise, themost success I had in gaining permission to be present in normatively private timesof day was with one family with whom I spent a number of full days over thecourse of nearly a year. The intimacy of that relationship allowed for a blurring ofthe outsider/insider boundary and resulted in an invitation to perform ethno-graphic observation immediately on the family’s waking.

In this discussion I have not meant to imply that what I saw as a lessening of tra-ditional power in the ethnographic relationship or of fieldwork and postfieldworkauthority are negatives. I feel that the ease with which our informants were able toprotect their privacy and the lack of incentive to do otherwise is ideal in terms ofpreventing informant exploitation or misuse of authority. Furthermore, in this casea lack of data was data: Simply by observing what families construed as space andtime that were off limits to me and who in the household made those decisions pro-vided valuable information in and of itself.

IMPLICATIONS

Ethnography offers detailed information that can contribute to understandinghow people experience their family lives in their environmental and cultural con-texts and how it feels and what it means to be family. Ethnographic participationgives a researcher the unique opportunity to experience events as they unfold, see-ing activities take place in their everyday surroundings and observing the nuancesand subtleties of the interactions that provide the backdrop for family life. In ourown research, ethnography gave a firsthand perspective on media use and content.This helped us understand the place of diverse media in parents’ lives: how theyused them, what messages were in them, and if there was congruence betweenthose messages and how parents moved through their daily lives. For the otherresearchers whose studies were cited, ethnographic data similarly provided on-the-ground perspectives on diverse phenomena, including work and family, fam-ily functioning and individual development in the community context, childhoodand adolescent socialization, and more. Some use ethnography as an auxiliary tothe main data collection methods, such as by performing participant observationto establish a research question or to flesh out findings from focus groups and


survey data. Many however use ethnography as their primary methodology toinvestigate a topic in depth, provide a richly contextualized depiction of their topic,and generate hypotheses about diverse family processes.

Despite the many benefits and possibilities of ethnographic data collection,there are drawbacks to the method. One is small numbers. Due to the intense andsometimes lengthy nature of the research, it is common to rely on small samples,making generalizations difficult. Ethnography is not useful for testing hypothesesas its nature makes isolating any one variable problematic (Anderson-Levitt, 2006).Data collection and recording are far less standardized than in other methods. Theconcepts of validity and reliability used in more quantitative research thus are noteasily applied (see Golafshani, 2003). My own fieldwork highlights some of theother challenges of ethnography, which are connected to its intimate nature. Theseinclude the social norms governing interactions between people of different sta-tuses and the concepts of public and private, which organize both time and spaceinto outsider- and insider-appropriate segments. My experience indicates that notunexpectedly, spending as much time as possible with families increased levels ofrapport and intimacy, which in turn allowed the relaxation of normally maintainedboundaries. Establishing good relations with informants however did not meanliving with them or spending tens of hours and dozens of days following theirevery movement. Warm relationships developed with visits that were not neces-sarily long but were repeated more than once.

My experience also shows the necessity of thinking through ahead of time issuesof identity as they relate to the research questions. In some cases, researcher–informant matching along some axes of identity may ease the research process, andin others it may hinder it. In our study, I conjecture that if I had been a man, theremight have been greater difficulty in obtaining permission to spend time alonewith mothers and children and that fathers would have been even more motivatedto enact male gatekeeper functions. I cannot be sure, but I also imagine that if I hadbeen of a significantly different ethnic, racial, or class background than the researchparticipants, there might have been additional barriers to intimacy. However, iden-tity matching can carry its own pitfalls. I was female and of childbearing age likemost of the informants, and many of them were stay-home mothers. If I also hadhad children, the identity congruencies in combination with the opposing workand family choice and all of its attendant ideological connotations may havecaused a strain in the research relationship.

CONCLUSION

This article outlined some of the ways in which ethnography can be employedin family studies research, alone and in combination with other methodologies.The example of our own research showed how methods can be combined to pro-duce a richly textured, comprehensive picture of a phenomenon. Ethnographicinterviews and focus groups gave us information on how research participantsspoke of their work and family choices and the place of media in their lives.Ethnographic observation gave us a more concrete sense of the ways in whichthey used media and lived out their work and family lives. It also enabled us togain some insight into the social context of media: how messages were receivedand processed as individuals reacted to them and talked about them while they


were being transmitted. At the same time, I was present to see how the parents’days actually played out, such as who was home when, what they did when theywere there, who cooked and did housework, how many hours were spent by eachparent taking care of children, and so on. My participation in families’ routinesmeant that I was able to experience as well as see how hectic balancing work andfamily could be and to appreciate parents’ strategies for getting it all done. Theimmediacy of such data is the primary reward of ethnography. Although there arecertain challenges to using this technique, especially with populations used tofirm definitions of private and public space and time, my experience shows that itcan be done and that it is worthwhile doing to continue to enhance our under-standings of family experiences and processes.

NOTE

1. I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing this out.

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