Race and older mothers' differentiation: a sequential quantitative and qualitative analysis

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate a process by which qualitative and quantitative approaches are combined to reveal patterns in the data that are unlikely to be detected and confirmed by either method alone. Specifically, we take a sequential approach to combining qualitative and quantitative data to explore race differences in how mothers differentiate among their adult children. We began with a standard multivariate analysis examining race differences in mothers' differentiation among their adult children regarding emotional closeness and confiding. Finding no race differences in this analysis, we conducted an in-depth comparison of the Black and White mothers' narratives to determine whether there were underlying patterns that we had been unable to detect in our first analysis. Using this method, we found that Black mothers were substantially more likely than White mothers to emphasize interpersonal relationships within the family when describing differences among their children. In our final step, we developed a measure of familism based on the qualitative data and conducted a multivariate analysis to confirm the patterns revealed by the in-depth comparison of the mothers' narratives. We conclude that using such a sequential mixed methods approach to data analysis has the potential to shed new light on complex family relations.     

Avenues to prestige among adolescents in public and religiously affiliated high schools

We used data from 1,733 college students to explore whether adolescents' avenues to prestige differ in public and private high schools. Students attending seven large universities during the 1997--98 academic year provided information on the ways in which adolescents in their high schools had gained prestige with peers. The analyses revealed no differences by high school type for girls, with the exception of greater emphasis on clothes in public schools as compared with private schools. For boys, the differences were more pronounced. Boys who attended private schools were less likely than those who attended public schools to accrue prestige through clothes and car ownership and more likely to gain prestige through general sociability and having a good reputation. However, boys who attended private schools were more likely to gain prestige through being the class clown. Taken together, the findings show few differences between avenues to prestige for girls in private and public high schools, and differences for boys that are not uniformly in the direction that parents and private school advocates would predict or desire.     

Did Mom Really Love You Best? Developmental Histories,Status Transitions,and Parental Favoritism in Later Life Families

In this paper, we draw upon insights from the developmental psychological literature on younger families to investigate within-family differences in parent–adult child relations in later life families. Using data from 30 families, we examine whether mothers aged 65–75 report greater closeness to particular adult children, and the extent to which patterns of closeness can be explained by within-family differences in the children's status transitions and developmental histories. Eighty percent of the mothers reported being closer to at least one of their adult children. Further, mothers were more likely to report that the children to whom they were closest had experienced nonnormative status transitions or other problematic events that had been involuntary and had made the children more dependent on their mothers. In contrast, mothers were least likely to name children who experienced voluntary problematic events. Comparison of the data from mothers with that from adult children revealed substantial discrepancies in reporting developmental histories, thus demonstrating the limitations imposed by collecting data from only one generation. Taken together, these findings suggest that examining within-family variations in social structural transitions and developmental histories, in combination with collecting data from multiple generations, may shed light on the quality of intergenerational relations.