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ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE EARLY HEAD START
EVALUATION:
CONTRIBUTIONS FROM LOCAL RESEARCH TO UNDERSTANDING PROGRAM PROCESSES
Paul Spicer, Carol McAllister, and Robert Emde,
University of Colorado and the University of Pittsburgh
The national Early Head Start evaluation follows a traditional
random-assignment research design, with quantitative measures of process
and outcome. Several sites, however, included anthropological work as
part of their local research to tell the story of program implementation
more fully and to document the sociocultural contexts in which programs
operated. Here, we describe the ethnographic research at two sites, Denver-Family
Star (FS) and Pittsburgh.
Ethnographic research at Denver-FS was designed to illuminate
the ways in which the families served by the Early Head Start program
accepted or rejected the program's Montessori intervention. In the United
States, Montessori interventions tend to be associated with middle- and
upper-class families and communities, so the Denver-FS research team was
especially interested in how families living in poverty would receive
the curriculum. Moreover, since the program's theory of change was based
on the idea that children would bring Montessori principles into their
families' homes, it was crucial to understand the extent to which this
was happening. The ethnographic study was designed to address both these
issues by focusing on (1) the child's experience in the Montessori classrooms,
and (2) how a subset of families understood the intervention and reacted
to it.
The first year of this research was devoted to understanding
the program intervention through twice-a-week, half-day sessions of participant
observation in the classrooms. This work was a prerequisite to the home-visiting
phase of the study, in that we first had to understand what the program
was attempting to do with children before examining how children and families
received it. This participant observation documented staff attention to
encouraging the autonomy and individuality of children in their exploratory
activities. Researchers also documented the emotional sensitivity of children
to transitions, such as changes in caregivers and classrooms. After the
program had been open for one year, 12 families were recruited into the
home visit phase of the study. In this component, the ethnographer visited
families at six-month intervals after their children had been in the program
one year in order to understand how parents understood the intervention
and how it had affected them and their children.
Perhaps the most striking finding in this research was the
extent to which parents became vocal advocates for Montessori during their
involvement with the program. While most parents began by knowing very
little about Montessori, they were almost immediately impressed by their
children's developmental progress, especially in their growing independence
and facility in daily routines (for example, cleaning up after a meal
or after play), which were major emphases in the program's classrooms.
With program staff, parents believed that the progress their children
were showing in these areas at 2 and 3 years of age would translate directly
into their success in school. They eagerly capitalized on an opportunity
to continue Montessori education for their children at a local public
school preschool program after they left the Early Head Start program.
The preliminary results from this ethnographic research have emphasized
that, contrary to what may have been believed about Montessori prior to
the program's experience, low-income parents appreciated and, indeed,
valued the changes that they saw it produce in their children, confirming
the program's hypothesis that they would succeed in changing families
by first changing their children.
The ethnographic study in Pittsburgh was designed as a series
of nested investigations that included (1) exploration of community and
policy developments that influence operation of the Early Head Start program,
(2) participant observation of Early Head Start program activities and
focus groups with program staff to trace the evolution of the program
and shifts in its theory of change, and (3) home visits and ethnographic
interviews with program families about their experience in the program
and their own understandings of key program components. An integration
of these three strands of research helped elucidate the relationships
among community context, program implementation, and family perspectives
and cultures.
The issue of child care illustrates the value of this approach.
Researchers noted early that changes in welfare policy were leading to
an increased need for out-of-home child care, which created new challenges
for the Pittsburgh home-visiting program, whose theory of change focused
on the parent-child relationship as the primary vehicle for positive child
development. At the same time, ethnographic interviews with Early Head
Start families made clear that relationships remained crucial in their
cultural understanding of parenting, articulated as "being there."
Indeed, the importance of "being there" contrasted sharply with
the public discourse of policymakers, who emphasized an equation between
good parenting and employment. We related families' expressed interests
in being there for their children to another insight provided by the ethnographic
case studies concerning the importance of trusting personal relationships
more generally. By doing so, we came to better understand one of the reasons
why Early Head Start families chose informal neighbor/relative care for
their children when they were at work.
This set of factors, and the insights provided by ethnographic
research, led the Early Head Start program to expand home-visiting services
to informal child care providers, offering them child development information
and strengthening the mutual relationships among child, parent, and provider.
In this way, the program's theory of change was elaborated to respond
to both changing community contexts and increased understanding of family
cultures, which were revealed, at least in part, by the ongoing ethnographic
work.
These brief representations of ethnographic work in
two sites provide insight into the meaning of interventions for families
and program staff. This information is likely to prove valuable not only
in documenting the stories of these programs and the families they serve,
but also in providing insight into aspects of program process not anticipated
in the design of the randomized trial.
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