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While many school choice studies focus on individual parents’ preferences, we simultaneously address the structural context within which families make decisions and the strategies they develop in r...

There is a dearth of methodological guidance on how to conduct participant observation in private spaces such as family homes. Yet, participant observations can provide deep and valuable data about family processes. This article draws on two ethnographic studies of family life in which researchers conduct in-depth interviews, recruit families, and ultimately enter the family as a quasi-stranger for daily observations lasting a fixed period (e.g., three weeks). We term this approach “intensive family observations.” Here, we provide concrete methodological advice for this method, beginning with guidelines for recruitment and gaining consent. We also discuss logistics of conducting family observation (e.g., scheduling, spatial positionality in the home, role in the field, among other issues). We elaborate on the key challenges, specifically issues of intrusion, power, and positionality. Last, we reflect on how this method provides opportunities for accurately capturing deeply intimate moments as well as unexpected insights.

Scholars have debated how to carry out research with children, particularly about how to generate the most accurate data in an ethically-sensitive fashion. But there has been limited discussion of the practicalities of such research. Relying on our own ethnographic studies with children and families, conducted two decades apart, we argue that studying children heightens routine research challenges and requires the constant balancing of pressures. Our studies highlight difficulties in two broad arenas: the simultaneous management of procedural obligations to children and their gatekeepers (‘the double act’), and the need to juggle satisfying adult norms of interaction while generating and maintaining rapport with children (‘walking the tightrope’). These heightened challenges cannot be solved through use of the “right” method. Rather, they should be acknowledged and met with flexibility, reflexivity, and perseverance. More broadly, open discussion of the difficulties faced while conducting research should not be seen as revealing failings, but as a vital way for scholars to advance the field.

Despite consensus that neighborhoods influence children's outcomes, we know less about the mechanisms that cause neighborhood inequality and produce those outcomes. Existing research overlooks how social networks develop among people at similar points in the life course through repeated interactions in neighborhoods. Existing studies do not illuminate the ways in which these geographically based networks can influence life–altering decisions. In this article, we use qualitative interviews with White, middle–class parents in gentrifying neighborhoods in a large Northeastern city to examine how parents decided where to send their children to kindergarten. Parents reported relying heavily on information that they received from their network of other neighborhood parents whom they had befriended on the playground or at daycare in the course of their daily child–rearing routines. The daily routines of child rearing led to rich and important social networks. But tensions also emerged among parents as they made different decisions about where to send their children to kindergarten. By focusing on how life course stages affect how people use space and interact in neighborhood spaces, we can better understand how neighborhood spaces shape the decision–making process of school choice.

Annette Lareau is currently the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor in the Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. in sociology from the University of California at Santa Cruze in 1974, and M.A. as well as Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1978 and 1984 respectively. She started her career at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1986 and then she went to teach in Temple University and the University of Maryland before she joined the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 as the Stanley I. Sheerr Professor. Lareau is a sociologist who studies family life. She is interested how the social position of children and parents has an impact on the quality of their life experiences. She has explored these issues in the arena of family-school relationships, the cultural logic of child rearing, the process through which parents go about deciding where to live and send their children to school. Her works have received numerous awards. Unequal Childhood is one of her masterpieces, which won the C. Wright Mills Award in 2004. She was elected as the President of American Sociological Association in 2013.

As Hartmann illuminates, it is important for sociologists to engage in public sociology. Yet, public audiences do not always receive research results in a passive and positive manner. Instead, as w...

This chapter argues that scholars and educators have looked at the evidence regarding parent involvement selectively, concentrating almost exclusively on the benefit s of such involvement. It discusses some of the social and psychological costs of parent involvement programs for children, parents, and educators. Parents' efforts to be involved in schooling, while well-intentioned, can discourage school achievement, disrupt family life, and create difficulties for teachers and principals. In some parents' eyes, simply getting their children up, dressed, fed and off to school in a timely fashion is a major contribution to their schooling. Educators often miss actions that parents consider to be a legitimate part of their involvement in schooling. The existing standards for parent involvement in schooling are such that some parents are able to comply with teachers' expectations much more easily than other parents. Parent involvement in schooling is also potentially disruptive of family life if homework is allowed to become a battleground.

Empirical research on cultural and social capital has generally ignored the key role of institutions in setting standards that determine the contingent value of this capital. Furthermore, many studies presume that the yielding of profit from cultural, social, and economic capital is automatic. Bourdieu’s concept of field highlights the ‘‘rules of the game’’ and shows that parents’ displays of capital only are valuable when they help parents comply with institutional standards. In this article, we examine how the field shapes parents’ efforts to transmit advantages to their children through accessing high-status elementary schools. Drawing on interviews with 45 black and white middle-class families, as well as observation of school admission events and interviews with 20 school administrators, we illuminate the rules of the kindergarten admission game and describe how parents attempted to use capital to compete in the field in one large, urban district. We show the rules to be complex, hard to learn about, and implemented inconsistently. In this context, cultural, social, and economic capital that helped parents navigate the field had the potential to be profitable. But even parents with deep reservoirs of capital did not realize their first choice when they misunderstood the rules of the game or faced an imbalance of supply and demand for slots in highly desired schools. Thus, we argue that models need to take into account both the situational meaning of capital and the uncertainty in parents’ efforts to use their capital to transmit advantages to their children.

Annette Lareau, a sociologist, wrote the following piece as an appendix to her book Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education. Lareau's essay lays bare some of the common trials and tribulations faced by a graduate student engaging in his or her first field study. When she considered publishing the piece, she worried that her fieldwork mistakes were so serious that revealing them could have a negative impact on her scholarly reputation and, possibly, her future career. Drawn from the research for her doctoral dissertation, Lareau's study examines social-class differences in parental involvement in schools. Using case studies, Lareau shows positive consequences for some children from involvement as well as negative consequences when working-class parents adopt a separation between home and schooling. This chapter focuses on method of home advantage, and problems with the research question.

Decades after the publication of his key works, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of education remains the object of persistent misunderstanding. A coherent account of this work must distinguish, at minimum, two phases to Bourdieu’s thoughts on education. During the early period, Bourdieu asserted the salience of both self-selection and institutional selection in shunting students into class destinations that echoed their class origins. However, these works were uniformly devoted to identifying the peculiarities of the (then) contemporary French system, considered to be an exemplar of a distinct (“traditionalistic”) institutional form. In contrast, Bourdieu’s later work sought to develop a model of the relation between education and social inequality that had significant cross-national scope. This work de-emphasized the role of self-selection, and developed a substantially more nuanced account of the relation between education and social mobility. What Bourdieu terms the “scholastic mode of reproduction” in this period denotes a system in which children from the upper reaches of the class structure are systematically advantaged in the pursuit of social rewards by virtue of their inherited cultural capital, yet nevertheless face a real risk of downward mobility. For this reason, we term it a theory of “imperfect social reproduction.”

Recent research suggests that participation in organized extracurricular activities by children and adolescents can have educational and occupational payoffs. This research also establishes that participation is strongly associated with social class. However, debate has ensued—primarily among qualitative researchers—over whether the association between class and activities stems exclusively from inequalities in objective resources and constraints or whether differing cultural orientations have a role. We address this debate using a nationally representative sample of children’s time diaries, merged with extensive information on their families, to model participation in, and expenditures on, organized activities. While we cannot directly observe cultural orientations, we account for a substantially wider array of resources and constraints than previous studies. We find that, above and beyond these factors, maternal education has a consistently large effect on the outcomes we study. We discuss the plausibility of a cultural interpretation of this result, as well as alternative interpretations.

Using both qualitative longitudinal data collected 20 years after the original Unequal Childhoods study and interview data from a study of upwardly mobile adults, this address demonstrates how cultural knowledge matters when white and African American young adults of differing class backgrounds navigate key institutions. I find that middle-class young adults had more knowledge than their working-class or poor counterparts of the “rules of the game” regarding how institutions worked. They also displayed more of a sense of entitlement to ask for help. When faced with a problem related to an institution, middle-class young adults frequently succeeded in getting their needs accommodated by the institution; working-class and poor young adults were less knowledgeable about and more frustrated by bureaucracies. This address also shows the crucial role of “cultural guides” who help upwardly mobile adults navigate institutions. While many studies of class reproduction have looked at key turning points, this address argues that “small moments” may be critical in setting the direction of life paths.