Re: Survey/Interview of Fathers

[lisa fontes <lfontes@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Mass. healthy families evaluation project is being run out of Tufts
University. They have included an ethnographer as part of the study and are
certainly asking about (and observing) issues of discipline among African
Americans. I don't think they are looking at fathers. The ethnographer is
Jayanthi Mistry & can be contacted at: jmistry@emerald.tufts.edu

Forgive my skepticism but I have my doubts about the quality of information
that would be provided on a survey instrument under the circumstances and
with the population you describe. The fathers would have every reason to
mistrust the investigators and little reason to trust them. I wrote a couple
of articles about Cultural issues in child maltreatment research--I can send
you the references if you're interested.  An African American  friend who
was administering such an instrument in Georgia told me the following
anecdote, that you might find instructive:
    She was asking a low-income African American participants some questions
from a discipline survey and the participant looked her hard in the eye and
said, "Now I KNOW you didn't write these questions." The two of them
laughed.

The implication: "these questions do not fit our circumstances." Perhaps you
can integrate some more observational or conversational methods into your
study.

Lisa Fontes