Discovering Successful Pathways in Children’s Development: Mixed Methods in the Study of Childhood and Family Life. Thomas S. Weisner, ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2005. ix + 443 pp.

Reviewed by Paul Spicer, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, American Indian and Alaska Native Programs, University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center

Ethnography has arrived, once again, in research on child development. The wide-ranging contributions to this volume, the result of a conference sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Pathways through Middle Childhood, attest to the ways in which ethnographic approaches and insights have become integral to our attempts to understand how and why children develop as they do. The book is organized into five major sections detailing 1) models for understanding successful pathways in child development (three chapters), 2) the development of ethnic identity (two chapters and two commentaries), 3) the role of culture in understanding developmental pathways (two chapters), 4) the role of ethnography in experimental research (two chapters and two commentaries), and 5) the use of multiple methods in understanding family interventions (three chapters). It is opened with a comprehensive overview by Thomas Weisner and closed with some intriguing suggestions by Jennifer Greene, who has long labored to articulate the possibilities of multiple methods in program evaluation.

As Tom Fricke notes in his excellent contribution to this volume, ethnography should probably be understood much less as a distinct method (e.g., participant observation) and much more as an orientation toward the cultural (which can be pursued using any number of methods). And several of the chapters here emphasize the value of this broad perspective. One of the most intriguing is by Rubén G. Rumbaut, who utilizes data that many survey researchers would not likely characterize as ethnographic at all—coded responses to open-ended survey questions about one’s own ethnic and racial identifications, which were administered to over 5,000 children of immigrants in southern California and south Florida. While the act of coding these responses is certainly an interpretive activity familiar to anthropologists, Rumbaut’s extensive quantitative analyses would not commonly be seen as ethnographic. Nevertheless his results enrich our understanding of racial and ethnic formations in the U.S. in some intriguing ways, pointing to how and why young people move between various racial ethnic identities, including foreign national (e.g., Mexican), hyphenated American (e.g., Mexican-American), pan-ethnic (e.g., Hispanic or Latino), and simple American (e.g., American) identities. His chapter alone would justify the purchase of the book by anyone with an interest in culture and child development, but there is much much more.

Many contributions to the volume document the ways in which more orthodox ethnographic work, e.g., participant observation or open-ended interviewing, has provided important insights in the context of a larger research project. Perhaps the most compelling examples of this are drawn from what Weisner classifies, in separate sections of the book, as social experiments and family intervention studies. Here, the growing involvement of ethnographers in randomized controlled trials, and the value of such involvement, is clearly on display. The contribution by Gibson-Davis and Duncan, in particular, is notable for its careful consideration of the strengths and limitations of their qualitative data, which was collected from a random sample of participants in the New Hope trial in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—a program that involved substantial support to parents attempting to secure nearly full-time employment (30 hours/week). As these authors observe, their intensive qualitative work with a subset of families in the trial pointed the way to new hypotheses regarding program effects and to new measures to capture dynamics that were not anticipated in the original research design. At the same time, they note that their qualitative sample was simply too small to draw conclusions about the program’s effects, which meant that they still needed the large-scale data collection to establish the generalizability of their findings.

If there is one consistent theme that emerges across multiple contributions to this volume it is the one articulated so clearly by Gibson-Davis and Duncan: that qualitative research has immense potential for illuminating new dynamics, which gain credence when they can be tested in a larger quantitative dataset. But, as Jennifer Greene notes in her concluding reflections on the volume, this is only one way of conceptualizing the relationship between qualitative and quantitative approaches: in addition to helping us “get it right” or to broaden our understandings of complex phenomena, mixed methods can also challenge conventional wisdom by drawing attention to areas of discrepancy and they can serve to clarify the political and ethical dimensions of our work.

The moral dimensions of multi-method research are best articulated in two of the final chapters of the volume: one by Cooper and her colleagues on research partnerships and one by Mica Pollock on civil rights and education. In both cases, the value of ethnographic attention to questions of meaning emerges as central in the negotiation between university and community partners, in the case of Cooper, and attorneys, researchers, and educators, in the case of Pollock. Both pieces serve to emphasize the ways in which qualitative methods have value over and above their ability to yield testable hypotheses or to generate new measures for verification in large datasets.

As Fricke notes, one would hope that the time will soon be past for the need to justify the value of ethnography in research on child development. The wide range of contributions to this volume, which has methodology as an explicit focus, will hopefully hasten this process by rendering the value of such work an established fact. The quality of the work reported here, and engaged in even more broadly in child development (large national trials in infancy research, e.g., the Comprehensive Child Development Project or Early Head Start, have also had explicit ethnographic research), means that those of us involved in this work can soon look forward to the time when we will no longer need to justify our approaches and can, instead, focus our attention on developing better research on the persistent barriers that keep all too many children from realizing their potential.

Indeed, the importance of this volume is not simply methodological and it deserves a broader audience than it might otherwise receive based simply on the title. Multiple chapters in this volume emphasize that parents are engaged in interactions with their children with specific aims in mind, that they make choices within constraints that are often very limited and that, accordingly, efforts to change parents and children must be based on where they find themselves and what they want rather than on where others think they should be going. Many of the intervention efforts examined here could have been much more efficiently targeted if these facts were known in advance and one would hope that these lessons have now been learned (although a certain level of doubt that they have is understandable). While psychological anthropologists can and should take pride in the insights derived from their methods, it may be even more gratifying to recognize that these insights are due, in fundamental ways, to a theoretical heritage that focuses attention on the systems of meaning that shape family life and child development in diverse contexts. It is likely these theoretical advances (rather than the methodological ones) will be the more lasting contributions of this fine work.