Research

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CHAPTER 9
PRODUCING FAMILY TIME:
PRACTICES OF LEISURE ACTIVITY BEYOND THE
HOME

2. “This chapter presents my analysis of an occasional, local, and apparently rather trivial
activity—the family outing to the zoo—but I want to suggest that it can be read as part of a
larger story, about the changing character of middle- and working-class family life. Part of
this large story revolves around time—how much time parents can and do spend with
families (Hochschild, 1997), for example; who is overworked and why (Schor, 1992); and how
to provide for the quality time that most Americans believe is so crucial for children’s
development (Daly, 1998). Policy makers take up these questions in the context of an
emergent discourse of work/family (or sometimes work/life) issues. Such developments are
signals of a large social transformation in the organization of work and family life—arising in
large part from the establishment of middle-class wives and mothers as relatively permanent
members of the labor force.”

3. “My intention is to analyze family ethnomethodologically, as a distinctive social configuration
that is continually brought into being through people’s activities, interactions, and
interpretations, situated within powerful discourses of family life (DeVault, 1991; Griffith &
Smith, 1987; Gubrium & Holstein, 1990). Such an approach recognizes biological, economic,
and legal connections as critical resources for constituting family relationships, but it also
implies that these connections are mobilized and given meaning only through interactive
interpretive processes. A social sense of the primordial character of family experience is held
in place, like other social realities, through collective practices of sense-making (Garfinkel,
1967) that establish the routine grounds of shared experience. Thus, family relations are
sustained through the social practices of many actors in a multitude of social settings.”

4. METHODS AND DATA
• The core of my analysis describes, on the basis of naturalistic observation (Adler & Adler,
1994), how family activities at the zoo are conducted, with a focus on parents’ practices
of coordinating the experience. Drawing on a tradition of sociological study of public life
(Gardner, 1995; Goffman, 1971; Lofland,1973),I consider how family groups move into
and through the zoo, what they can be seen doing while there, and how they manage
their activity as one group among many.
• The observational data are supplemented by informal interviews conducted at the zoo,
and some data drawn from another interview study concerned more broadly with the
conduct of various outings.

5. • I collected observational data with help from several assistants. Our procedure was
relatively simple: In sessions of 1– 2 hours, we walked around the zoo, mingling with other
visitors and watching them carefully. Observations were relatively unstructured, but
focused on the movement of groups through the setting and how movement is
coordinated, the group members’ talk with one another about what they see, and their
interpretations of zoo exhibits.
• At the end of an observation session, we jotted brief notes to preserve the outlines of what
we had seen. Later (but as soon as possible), we wrote much more detailed accounts,
recording as much as we could remember about the composition, conduct, and
conversation of the groups we had observed. This procedure meant that we appeared to
be zoo visitors ourselves; in fact our conduct was shaped by our research purposes. We
generally tried to follow a particular group through several exhibits, standing near enough
to see and hear their activity and moving from one exhibit to the next at about the same
speed.

6. • We have made observations at a few smaller and larger community zoos in other cities, as
opportunities arise, and I have observed occasionally at other animal venues (e.g.,an
aquarium, a demonstration farm).
• After completing about 50 hours of unobtrusive observation, I obtained permission to do
more systematic data collection at the big-city zoo. During several days of observation, I
watched while family groups viewed various exhibits and took verbatim notes on their
conversation.
• In addition, I conducted informal interviews of about 10 minutes or so with 25 visitor
groups resting at the picnic area. In these conversations, I inquired about the relationships
among those who composed the visiting group, and asked several general questions
about their experiences (beginning with “What brought you to the zoo today?” and
following up with questions such as “What have you done during your visit?” “Do you
come to the zoo often?” “Did you have any kind of plan when you arrived?”).

7. FINDINGS
• The interview data confirm that the zoo is populated primarily by groupings that would be
considered family by almost any definition, although many of these groupings diverge from
the nuclear family model consisting of parents and their children alone.
• In this analysis, I focus on the observable practices through which adults and children in such
groupings jointly accomplish their time at the zoo. Parents (or other adult companions) use
the zoo as one of many sites that situate children within a public world, a world of objects
known in common. At the same time, practices of family recreation constitute the particular
family grouping as a significant one, with its own unique experiences of such public space.
• I begin by examining what appears to be a fundamental lesson of the zoo visit: the
development of a shared orientation to a viewable nonhuman landscape. I first analyze
parents’ and children’s practices, and then examine the zoo as an ensemble of exhibits and
texts that constitute a shared landscape. In the third part of the analysis, I return to the
practices of family members to show how the boundedness and uniqueness of a particular
family group is preserved within such settings.

8. THE COORDINATION OF LOOKING
• The core activity of a zoo visit is viewing the animals, as presented in their enclosures.
Some live in rows of small, simple cages; many, now, are presented in larger pens,
designed to simulate their natural habitats. Directions for viewing are provided by
signs posted near the exhibits; these identify the species on view, usually providing as
well some information about the species, or, less often, about individual animals.
• I was struck, when I began the fieldwork, by the simplicity (one might even say
banality) of most talk among zoo visitors, which was primarily concerned with the
work of seeing. While it might seem a simple matter for a family group to stand at an
enclosure and see the animals it contains, a close look at their activity reveals that
they work assiduously at this accomplishment. Much of the talk among groups
consists of announcements and directives. For example:

9. • There were a few small groups standing at low fences by the ponds, commenting briefly
on the birds. One child announced, “A flamingo, a flamingo!” Elsewhere, I heard a father
note, “It’s a toucan.” Others were just locating the birds, with comments like, “There’s one,”
or “Look at that.”
• This excerpt illustrates both generic pointing talk (“Look!” “There!”) and species naming
(“Lions!”). These simple exchanges among family members coordinate and comment on
their joint looking. Their talk ensures that they look together.

10. THE ZOO AS AN ENSEMBLE OF TEXTS
• Interpretive signs provide information about zoo exhibits. These aids nearly always indicate
species names and habitats, sometimes supplemented with information about notable
features of a species or its behavior. Some signs control behavior, usually through gentle
prohibitions (“Please do not toss coins into the wet land. They could harm the animals.” Or,
on the stalls of the farm animals: “We bite.”); a few give credit for exhibits to corporate
sponsors.
• All this textual material exists as a possible resource for use in visitors’ interaction with the
exhibits and with one another.
• In fact, signs are used, for the most part, in simple, direct ways, to reinforce and make
meaningful the proper gaze discussed earlier.

11. THE CONSTRUCTION OF FAMILY SPACE
IN PUBLIC
• Family groups must coordinate their movement around the zoo, from one exhibit to another. They
move from place to place not as autonomous individuals but in amoeba-like collective
formations. The practices of moving together, like those of looking together, vary with the ages of
children in family groups.
Infants and toddlers are often carried or ride in strollers, so that parents can rely on such
equipment to keep children nearby and position them in front of viewable sights.
 As children get older and begin to move about independently, they tend to circulate around
adult and older child members of their groups. A common pattern we observed involved a
parent or parents walking relatively slowly and directly from one place to another, while young
children buzzed around them, like little satellites.
Sometimes family members hold hands as they walk along, but it is much more common for
the group simply to maintain proximity, using talk or eye contact to monitor the positions of
others.

12. • From time to time, I have tested the strength of the family boundaries on talk by
offering conversational overtures to parents in nearby family groupings. Typically,
parents respond to an initial conversational offering, briefly (the zoo is a friendly place,
after all), but decline to pursue talk beyond a one-time exchange; in response to a
follow-up remark, they nod politely and turn away, attending assiduously to their
children and signaling to me that our conversation should end.
• This conversational pattern means that the collective activity of looking/watching is
contained in family groups—members do not usually speak about exhibits to those in
neighboring groups—and therefore what’s seen at the zoo is constructed as the family’s
experience.

13. DISCUSSION:
FAMILY AS SOCIALLY ORGANIZED PRACTICE
Conceptually, I have tried to illustrate an ethnomethodologically based approach to family
studies that focuses on activity and interpretation. Rather than treating family as an objective
entity, defined from outside, this approach treats family as discursively organized practice, a
mode of action rather than a state of being.7 The value of such an approach lies in its ability to
capture the fluidity and diversity of family life as it actually occurs in the world, beginning with
the sites where family is happening, rather than with notions of family form that are more
durable in scholarship than in the world (Smith, 1993).
Though the zoo visit may be experienced by participants in myriad ways—with pleasure,
boredom, or indifference; as simple fun, nature education, or a difficult ordeal; and so on—its
core activities virtually always involve family members in practices that define and reinforce a
series of significant boundaries: between humans and animals, between properly viewable and
insignificant sights, and between family and others.

14.  My analysis of family activity at the zoo brings into view a kind of parental work that
pervades everyday life, situating very young children within a world-known-in-common—a
foundation for the related work of “developing the child” (Noble, cited in Smith, 1987). This
kind of work pervades life with children. In contemporary, highly stratified societies, it is
discursively organized in increasingly elaborate ways.
 Realms of family life—as lived by some—typically appear as terrains of choice and
autonomy, where members of the society share aspirations and equally participate in
fundamental human experiences of connection, responsibility, and pleasure—any parent,
this illusion suggests, can enjoy taking a child to the zoo.
 My intention here is to locate an extended parental work process within the complex of
structures and institutions beyond the home: to bring into view the workplaces, as it were,
that shape the efforts of parents in various ways.

15.  I mean to show that a family outing to the zoo is produced through collective activity in
the broadest sense, as family members engage in constant interplay with other realms
of activity that constitute the structural features of contemporary life: the shared
economic and cultural circumstances of household members, public facilities and their
differential accessibility, industries of education and entertainment, and the professions
that produce knowledge about parenting and family life.
 People practice family—artfully, creatively, with intention—in local settings, in more
diverse groups than family scholars may acknowledge. And their intentions and craft are
formed within material and discursive contexts that shape and channel those efforts in
ways that family scholars have yet to fully recognize and explore.

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CHAPTER 10

17. • In this chapter, I join this chorus of challenge to the traditional view of science, arguing that
attention to racial-ethnic dimensions of social organization will produce a more complete and
accurate science.
• The examples I will discuss also illustrate some of the ways that race and ethnicity are significant
in the science-based field of community nutrition work.
• The literature on qualitative research methods has been much concerned with questions about
the effects of researchers’ identities on their studies:
• Classic fieldwork discussions often consider the advantages and disadvantages of insider and
outsider status with respect to the group under study (e.g., Hughes, 1984; Merton, 1972; Wax,
1979; Zinn, 1979). More recently, as research on gender issues has become increasingly race and
class sensitive, feminist researchers have addressed similar issues, considering how the cross-
cutting ties of gender and other oppressions work to facilitate or obstruct qualitative research
(e.g., DeVault, 1990; Edwards, 1990; Oakley, 1981; Riessman, 1987); however, the fieldwork
tradition—like American culture more generally—has been relatively silent on the significance of
race-ethnicity in the analysis of data.

18. • This analysis arises at the intersection of these two strands in my training as a sociologist.
On the one hand, my research is driven by a commitment to making visible the
oppressions of race, class, and gender; on the other, by the qualitative methodologist’s
dictum, that we must allow our findings to emerge from the data.
• Rosalind Edwards(1990),too, suggests that understanding and acknowledging differences
in racial-ethnic positioning will construct a more productive basis for interviewing across
racial-ethnic groups than will asserting a disingenuous claim to commonality. The
analysis that follows is meant to extend these insights.

19. METHOD
• The data discussed here come from a larger project concerned with the social organization of
knowledge and work in dietetics and nutritional counseling. This predominantly female field of
work includes hospital dietitians; community and public health nutritionists; and professionals
who work in settings such as corporations, government agencies, health clubs, and the media. In
the larger study, I am concerned with how fields of work and authority are constructed and how
gender is implicated in these constructions (see DeVault, 1995).
• The study is based on fieldwork I began in 1981 and have carried on in several waves since then
in three different cities and a variety of settings. My method, based on Dorothy Smith’s
conception of an “institutional ethnography” (1987), involves using interviews with practitioner-
informants to learn about their field of work and about the social relations they are drawn into
through their training and the organization of their daily activity.

20. • Dorothy Smith and others use the term institutional ethnography to refer to an investigation that
explores the embeddedness of particular actors in a “ruling apparatus” or “regime” (G. Smith, 1990)
that coordinates their activity. The aim of research is to understand and disclose the social relations
of the ruling regime (or, as George Smith[1990,p.636] puts it, “how people’s activities are
reflexively/recursively knitted together into particular forms of social organization”).
• Institutional ethnographies can be based on various types of data, and a single investigation often
draws material from more than one source. One requirement, however, is some kind of investigation
that reveals the perspectives of practitioners in the setting in considerable detail.
• In this study, I have used a version of narrative analysis (Riessman,1993) to uncover practitioners’
experiences and perspectives. Narrative analysis in sociology has developed from the insight that
people often make sense of their lives (in interviews as well as everyday life) by telling and
interpreting stories.

21. • In order to produce narratives for analysis in this study, I conducted interviews with 35 food and
nutrition practitioners.4 I asked each to tell me “the story of your career,” and I urged them to give
detailed accounts of their increasing knowledge of the field and the decisions they made over the
years about training, certification, and work.
• Here, I work primarily with a single narrative—that of an African American woman, Janetta
Thompson, a registered dietitian who worked in an urban WIC program. Although I do not
analyze extended excerpts from interviews with other participants, I read Thompson’s interview
against the background of data from the larger study; thus, I refer to general features of
interviews with European American nutritionists and more specifically to the stories of two other
professionals of African descent who were part of the larger sample.

22. ANALYSIS
• As this interview ended, I remarked that, while I had heard some of the same things from other
community nutritionists, I had not talked much about race with anyone else. Unsurprised,
Thompson responded, “Because you don’t have that many people like me in the field.”
• The point here is not that I could not or should not interview more women of color, but rather
that it may be unnecessary and even exploitative to refrain from analysis until the researcher
feels she has a large enough sample of accounts from those in under represented groups.
(Indeed, African American feminists suggest that they are called on to do far more than their fair
share of explaining to others; see Rushin’s “The Bridge Poem”[1981])

23. DISCUSSION: ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE
IN NUTRITIONAL SCIENCE
• My analysis here represents one response to her charge that race and ethnicity should be part
of the analysis of any women’s profession, even if the field appears predominantly White. In this
analysis of Janetta Thompson’s narrative of her career, I have begun to see the outlines of an
analysis that attends to the racial-ethnic dimensions of professional work in dietetics and public
health nutrition.
• Dietitians and nutritionists work with food, and food is strongly connected to culture—and,
therefore, to race and ethnicity.
• My analysis has examined this kind of issue from a somewhat different angle. I have suggested
that working within the frame of professionalism makes it difficult to attend adequately to the
cultures of race and ethnicity and tends to hide the ways in which at least some nutrition
professionals (like Janetta Thompson) work with a sensitivity to culture and ethnicity.

24. ETHNICITY AND EXPERTISE IN
SOCIOLOGICAL METHOD
• I have relied on close analysis of an interview with an African American nutritionist to
disclose aspects of the racial-ethnic organization of her professional field.
• The lesson for the qualitative researcher, I believe, is that analyses will often be
strengthened by an attentive and knowledgeable search for the effects of racial-ethnic
constructions and inequalities in the lives of those we study.
• The conventional wisdom of the qualitative tradition directs the researcher to enter
the field with few expectations or assumptions and to build analyses on themes that
arise from subjects in the field.

25. • Both of the analytic approaches I have adopted here—institutional ethnography and narrative
analysis—depart from the most common approach to qualitative analysis, the constant
comparative method of grounded theory analysis.
• I wish to close with two suggestions for interview research sensitive to the play of race-ethnicity.
First, I recommend careful and detailed analysis of talk, understood as jointly constructed
interaction unfolding through time.
• My second recommendation is for what I would label a light- rather than heavy-handed
approach to the interpretation of interview data.