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Divergent Realities: The Emotional Lives of Mothers, Fathers, and Adolescents

1995; Wiley; Volume: 57; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/353704

1741-3737

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Reed Larson, Maryse H. Richards,

Mental Health Research Topics

Divergent Realities: The Emotional Lives of Mothers, Fathers, and Adolescents. Reed Larson & Maryse H. Richards. New York: Basic Books. 1994. 256 pp. ISBN 0-465-01662-6. $26.00 cloth. Family researchers, and social scientists generally, are often frustrated by the limitations of the methods available to them. Questionnaires rely on people's notoriously unreliable memories. Laboratory studies always beg the question of how much they resemble real life. A fantasizing family researcher might ask, wouldn't it be nice to be there during family interactions, as they occur naturally, and ask people about their moods and perceptions of those interactions as they occur? Remarkably enough, this idea turns out to be more achievable than it might seem, and the results of its fruition have been presented in a new book on adolescents and their families by Reed Larson and Maryse Richards. The authors used a unique methodological approach known as the experience sampling method, or ESM, in which participants carried beepers around and were beeped at eight random times during the day between 7:30 a.m. and 9:30 p.m. for 7 days. When beeped, family members would report in a booklet what they were doing, thinking, and feeling just before the beep, on rating scales as well as in their own words. The study included 55 two-parent, middle-class families living in suburban Chicago, all with adolescent in fifth through eighth grade. All members of a particular family were beeped at the same time, so that more than one perspective was obtained when they were beeped while together. The result is what authors call an emotional photo album of their family life, a set of snapshots of what one young adolescent and her parents go through in average week (p. 9). These snapshots are fascinating and revealing. Most striking is the disparity in moods and perceptions that family members often experience when together, and how oblivious they can be to one another's emotional realities. For example: Mom is shopping for clothes at the mall with her adolescent daughter, and reports thoroughly enjoying herself and thinking that her daughter is, too; at the same time, the daughter reports being bored and thinking about a prospective boyfriend. Family members often do not even agree about whether they are together; the wife cooking dinner in the kitchen reports being with her husband, who is watching TV; he reports watching TV, alone. Husbands and wives disagreed one-third of the time about whether or not they were together; mothers and children disagreed one-half of the time about this. …