Federal legislation provide funding for State grants to provide services that will prevent the unnecessary separation of children from their families, improve their quality of care, and ensure permanency. Progressive policies that can improve financial security and make families stronger include: increasing the minimum wage, strengthening collective bargaining, expanding Medicaid, and supporting reproductive rights. Of course, these four policies highlighted in this basic analysis do not fully explain differences between states on family outcomes. The states that share a progressive stance on these four policies also tend to have higher levels of educational attainment and lower levels of incarceration, both of which play an important role in family stability and strength.
ecting on a remarkable issue concerning insider knowledge, I should also consider some elements of research design more carefully in future research. A participant of the research was involved in qualitative research and informed me after the interview that they could acknowledge the interview structure. Thus, this interviewee gave rather short answers to the warming-up questions. Although this time it did not have any significant impact on the interview neither structure nor content-wise, in future research I should pay attention to the background of participants in qualitative research and not just to my insider situation in the researched topic.
Following the research ethics protocol, I shared an information sheet (see Appendix I.) about the project and asked for written consent of the participants prior to the interviews. During the course of the research, I faced an appearing ethical dilemma. In one interview I asked the participant to walk me through the last time they contacted their parents. They rejected it because they found the discussed topic too sensitive to share: “The last time, maybe it’s too personal to share with you, but, I mean, I can recall another one”. I acknowledged it was my ethical competence to deal with this kind of ‘conflict’ (Edwards and Mauthner, 2002). I believe my decision should serve the best interest of the interviewee because I highlighted in the information sheet that participants can withdraw – including withdrawing from answering particular questions – anytime with no consequences. Inckle (2015) argues that one of the essential elements of ethical research is being clear and consistent about the right of the participants, therefore, I supported the interviewee to changing describe a different occasion.
Preparing the raw transcribed interview for analysis, I coded the two interviews which I found the most remarkable content-wise. In the coding procedure I followed Coffey’s (1996) recommendation on starting the coding from the prefigured research question. I inductively generated my codes, which derived from the content of the interviews. To further organise my data, I grouped the commonly used codes into categories, also in a ‘bottom-up’ way, where I created the categories from the content of data. My aim was to identify the underlying forces of contacting habits, and open coding and categorization are regarded to be beneficial in helping the researcher find the points of interest (Strauss, 1987).
Preliminary findings
As a result of coding the two interviews, multiple points of interest have emerged. Firstly, it seems like the situational impact might generate similarities in the contacting habits of LSE students. Because of the unfamiliar and temporary nature of life situation, they gave an account of continually sharing information with their families. This raises the questions of what information they share with each other. Is there anything they, both students and families hide? If so, why? Generational effects in communication appeared to be an interesting point because as a result of continuous online availability communication with siblings looked to be different than with parents. This issue raises the question of whether there is a generation gap in communication. If yes, how does it affect parent-child communication? Furthermore, based on my coding process, the emotional support and encouragement provided by parents can regularly appear as a theme of communication, thus it might play a significant role in family maintenance. Thought-provoking questions regarding this issue can be: What counts as emotional support in a transnational setting? How is emotional
