Many of us believe we recognize the symptoms of middle age: lower back pain, mortgages, and an aversion to loud late-night activities. This particular construction of midlife, most often rendered in chronological, biological, and medical terms, has become an accepted reality to European-Americans and has recently spread to such non-Western capitals as Tokyo and New Delhi. Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions) explores the significance of this pervasive cultural representation alongside the alternative "fictions" that represent the life course in other regions of the world where middle age does not exist. In this volume, anthropologists, behavioral scientists, and historians explore topics ranging from the Western ideology of "midlife decline" to cultural representations of mature adulthood that operate without the category of middle age. The result is a fascinating, panoramic collection that explores the myths surrounding and the representations of mature adulthood and of those years in the life span from thirty to seventy. Weisner and Bernheimer on the use of qualitative, ethnography and mixed methods chapter on describing the outcomes of a counter-culture group of the 1960s who had been studied longitudinally with attention to their childrearing practices, lifestyle, and children's later social and psychological adaptation.

A Framework—the “agreement concept”—is developed to study the use of Cohen's kappa as well as alternative measures of chance-corrected agreement in a unified manner for qualitative and mixed methods research. Focusing on intrarater consistency it is demonstrated that for 2 × 2 tables an adequate choice between different measures of chance-corrected agreement can be made only if the characteristics of the observational setting are taken into account. In particular, a naive use of Cohen's kappa may lead to strinkingly overoptimistic estimates of chance-corrected agreement. Such bias can be overcome by more elaborate study designs that allow for an unrestricted estimation of the probabilities at issue. When Cohen's kappa is appropriately applied as a measure of chance-corrected agreement, its values prove to be a linear—and not a parabolic—function of true prevalence. It is further shown how the validity of ratings is influenced by lack of consistency. Depending on the design of a validity study, this may lead, on purely formal grounds, to prevalence-dependent estimates of sensitivity and specificity. Proposed formulas for “chance-corrected” validity indexes fail to adjust for this phenomenon. It is common practice to assess consistency of diagnostic ratings in terms of 'agreement beyond chance'. To explore the interpretation of such a term we consider relevant statistical techniques such as Cohen's kappa and log-linear models for agreement on nominal ratings. We relate these approaches to a special latent class concept that decomposes observed ratings into a class of systematically consistent and a class of fortuitous ratings. This decomposition provides a common framework in which the specific premises of Cohen's kappa and of log-linear models can be identified and put into perspective. As a result it is shown that Cohen's kappa may be an inadequate and biased index of chance-corrected agreement in studies of intra-observer as well as inter-observer consistency. We suggest a more critical use and interpretation of measures gauging observer reliability by the amount of agreement beyond chance.

Background Unstable child care arrangements can lead to negative consequences both for parents’ employment and for children’s well-being, particularly among families already struggling with low incomes and variable work schedules. This paper draws upon longitudinal ethnographic information from a sample of 44 working poor families who participated in the New Hope Demonstration, an experimental intervention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that provided a monthly earnings supplement, child care vouchers, and health care coverage to low-income parents if the parent worked 30 or more hours a week. The families in this study are representative of a much larger sample of families who participated in the New Hope antipoverty program. The paper examines three questions: (1) How much change and instability in child care arrangements do the families in our sample experience? (2) What features of everyday family life, and the family cultural ecology, are generally associated with change and instability? (3) How do subsidy programs available to these families like New Hope and Wisconsin Works, the state’s welfare reform initiative, promote or reduce stability of child care over time? And how can this best be studied from qualitative and mixed methods perspectives. Key Findings Changing child care arrangements were pervasive, with 84 percent of sample families experiencing a change at least once in the two years of follow-up. Most importantly, between about one-third and one-half of families experienced unplanned changes in child care arrangements during the follow-up period. Shifts in the family cultural ecology were the most important influence on stability in child care, including, in order of importance: – stability of work and job circumstances or in the household’s social supports; – assistance and stability of informal care providers; – the adequacy of material and social resources, including child care subsidies; – consensus or conflict among family members regarding child care; – the congruence between available child care and parents’ beliefs, goals, and values. Families’ descriptions of the difficulties they face meeting current child care subsidy rules and administrative hurdles suggest that modifications in the subsidy systems could render them more effective in assisting low-income working families. Conclusions and Implications The level of child care instability observed in this paper raises concerns. This ethnographic study extends what has been learned from previous research on child care instability by providing insight into the complex underlying reasons that account for the observed high levels of instability. The structure of subsidy policies could help mitigate some of the reasons for unplanned child care instability uncovered here. For example, child care support tied exclusively to work or income levels can lead to more instability since work is unstable in many cases. Establishing a family’s child care eligibility annually (as opposed to basing eligibility on current work effort, for example) would ensure that a child could remain in the same program for longer periods of time. These periods could be tied to school year cycles, for instance. Based on how parents talked about child care subsidies and how they responded to the current structure of the system, it is likely that, if child care supports were more stable and certain, the benefits of using child care subsidies would increase and the families’ ability to sustain their routines would improve.

Discusses the history and types of field observation methods from a sociological perspective. Offers a role-expectations view of observation systems requiring a reconceptualization of system development and the nature, sources, and management of error.

After eras of “blaming” parents for their children’s disabilities and relying on biomedical labels as both correct and sufficient to explain and name various conditions, research and practice today recognize the significance of the meaning and understanding of disabilities held by family members and children themselves. Elicited explanatory models from adolescents with varied cognitive disabilities and delay to better understand their personal experiences.

Discusses history, theory, and strategy for the use of statistical models in the discovery of cultural consensus. Introduces issues related to data collection strategy and the use of empirical data to identify and represent cultural characteristics.

Use of consensus theory to estimate culturally appropriate or "correct" answers to questions and assess individual differences in cultural knowledge. Describes the assumptions, appropriate interview materials, and analytic procedures fro carrying out a consensus analysis.

Content analysis of parent descriptions of their children toward understanding parental perceptions and attitudes regarding their adolescent children. The data for this article comes from a follow-up survey in the Family Lifestyles Project - a 20-year long longitudinal study of conventional and non-conventional families in the United States.

This study provides an example of how feminist psychology can bridge qualitative and quantitative methods while keeping lived experience at the center of an inquiry. Illustrates how feminist psychology research can bridge qual and quant methods while keeping lived experience as the center of inquiry. A qualitative analyis of interview data is distinguised via quant methods to explore differences in urban and suburban experiences with respect to reported sexual violation. A second qual approach more deeply explores the interaction of location reported violation.

One of the key elements in qualitative data analysis is the systematic coding of text (Strauss and Corbin, 1990; Miles and Huberman 1994:56). Codes are the building blocks for theory or model building and the foundation on which the analyst’s arguments rest. Implicitly or explicitly, they embody the assumptions underlying the analysis. Given the context of the interdisciplinary nature of research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), we have sought to develop explicit guidelines for all aspects of qualitative data analysis, including codebook development. On the one hand, we must often explain basic methods such as this in clear terms to a wide range of scientists who have little or no experience with qualitative research and who may express a deep skepticism of the validity of our results. On the other, our codebook development strategy must be responsive to the teamwork approach that typifies the projects we undertake at CDC, where coding is generally done by two or more persons who may be located at widely dispersed sites. We generally use multiple coders so that we can assess the reliability and validity of the coded data through intercoder agreement measures (e.g., Carey et al. 1996) and, for some projects, as the only reasonable way to handle the sheer volume of data generated. The standardized structure and dynamic process used in our codebook development strategy reflects these concerns. This paper describes (1) how a structured codebook provides a stable frame for the dynamic analysis of textual data; (2) how specific codebook features can improve intercoder agreement among multiple researchers; and (3) the value of team-based codebook development and coding. Origins of the Codebook Format Our codebook format evolved over the course of several years and a variety of projects. The conceptual origins took shape in 1993 during work on the CDC-funded Prevention of HIV in Women and Infants Project (WIDP) (Cotton et al. 1998), which generated approximately 600 transcribed semistructured interviews. One research question pursued was whether women’s narratives about their own heterosexual behavior could help us understand general processes of change in condom use behavior (Milstein et al. 1998). The researchers decided to use the processes of change (POC) constructs from the Transtheoretical Model (Prochaska 1984; DiClemente and Prochaska 1985) as a framework for the text analysis. However, the validity of the POC constructs for condom-use behavior was unknown, and a credible and rigorous text coding strategy was needed to establish their applicability and relevance for this context. To do this, the analysts had to synthesize all that was known about each POC construct, define what it was, what it was not, and, most importantly, learn how to recognize one in natural language. Several years earlier, O’Connell (1989) had confronted a similar problem while examining POCs in transcripts of psychotherapy sessions. Recognizing that "coding processes of change often requires that the coder infer from the statement and its context what the intention of the speaker was," O’Connell (1989:106) developed a coding manual that included a section for each code titled "Differentiating (blank) from Other Processes." Milstein and colleagues used O’Connell’s "differentiation" section in a modified format in their analysis of condom behavior change narratives. They conceptualized the "differentiation" component as "exclusion criteria," which complemented the standard code definitions (which then became known as "inclusion criteria"). To facilitate on-line coding with the software program Tally (Bowyer 1991; Trotter 1993), components were added for the code mnemonic and a brief definition, as well as illustrative examples. Thus, the final version of the analysis codebook contained five parts: the code mnemonic, a brief definition, a full definition of inclusion criteria, a full definition of exclusion criteria to explain how the code differed from others, and example passages that illustrated how the code concept might appear in natural language. During the code application phase, information in each of these sections was supplemented and clarified (often with citations and detailed descriptions of earlier work), but the basic structure of the codebook guidelines remained stable.