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This paper begins with a brief summary of the main and most current research-identified issues on family coping strategies. Second, the need for any intervention program to establish a "fit" with the coping styles of the family will be considered. Third, trends in research on family literacy that suggest effective directions for interventionists--in particular, with families of low-income minority status--will be identified.
Interventionists who wish to have a positive impact on family literacy should be aware of the coping strategies families are likely to engage in as they respond to the needs of a child with a disability. Indeed, they should be aware that, over the years, research on the issue of stress has shifted its focus from stressors to coping strategies, as it has become clear that many families exhibit a surprisingly high level of salutogenesis (sense of well-being), rather than pathology (Antonovsky, 1993). This is not to deny, however, that many families do become overwhelmed by the crisis (Singer, 1993).
A considerable body of research has sought to identify the factors that determine how stressful a child's disability will be to the family, as well as the kinds of supports that may alleviate that stress. A review by Shea and Bauer (1991) summarizes the main determinants as:
A source of stress noted more recently (Beckman, 1994) is the efforts of service providers and intervention programs, their good intentions notwithstanding.
Hill's ABCX family crisis model (1949) and recent adaptations (McCubbin & McCubbin, 1987) have been useful in sorting out the process of adaptation to potentially stressful events. The A, B, and C aspects of the model refer, respectively, to the stressful event, the family's personal and material resources for responding to it, and the meaning or interpretation the family places on the event; the confluence of these three factors determines X--the nature of the outcome for the family.
While early research tended to focus on the A and B factors (such as the nature of the child's exceptionality and the resources of the family), more recent approaches have attended to the C factor--with the belief that the meaning family members attribute to the event is a crucial factor in their adaptive process. One approach to understanding the C factor is to try to identify the cognitive coping strategies used by parents. Turnbull and Turnbull (1993) define cognitive coping as "thinking about a particular situation in ways that enhance a sense of well-being" (p. 1). Researchers who have pursued this concept have based their work on cognitive adaptive theory, which holds that personal adjustment includes resolution of "a search for meaning," "an attempt to gain mastery," and "enhancing self-esteem" (Behr & Murphy, 1993; Affleck & Tennen, 1993).
From a practical point of view, the most important question for this paper is how interventionists can design programs that will not add to the challenges faced by the family, nor disrupt the adaptive process already established by the family. To ensure that these negatives are not present, interventionists must know what families actually do on a day-to-day basis, and must identify the existing beliefs and skills of family members regarding literacy. Affleck and Tennen (1993) recommend that researchers seek to establish a much greater "descriptive base," and recommend that this be sought through the use of "intensive time sampling studies of the daily lives of individuals" (p. 145).
In a recent line of research, the team of Gallimore and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, investigated the ways parents construct what they call the family's ecocultural niche. This research offers detailed documentation of the types of accommodations parents make to their daily routines, in response to the needs of the child with the disability (Bernheimer, Gallimore & Kaufman, 1993). Not unlike earlier research on care-taking demands (Beckman, 1983), one dominant finding of this research is that children with high medical and behavioral needs tend to require greater parental accommodations to their daily routines than do children with mild or severe developmental delays. Such research should form the base of intervention designs, so as to create a fit between the design and the family. As Bernheimer et al. (1993) state: "Interventions that are fitted to the existing daily routine [of the family] appear to be more sustainable" (p. 266); therefore, researchers should "design interventions that capitalize on existing daily routines and ecocultural features [rather] than to attempt to create new activity slots" (p. 266).
Knowledge has been limited partly because it has been focused on subjects that, typically, are white and middle-class (as noted by Behr & Murphy, 1993)--in part because such families, it is argued, are easier to access through service agencies, and partly because these are the families who are, it seems, better able to respond to the formal questionnaire methods traditionally used by such research. It is important to access the views of families who do not belong to the dominant cultural groups in the society, partly because the incidence of disability is increasingly disproportionately high among these groups (U.S. Department of Education, 1992), and because our knowledge is simply too limited without their views. For example, research suggesting that some minority groups may show greater resilience when faced with disability is sparse but strong (Marion & McCaslin, 1979; Vasquez, 1973; Mary, 1990; Hanline & Daley, 1992).
The research methodology, then, is important both in determining the types of data that can be collected and the demographics of the sample likely to be accessed. With the advent of Public Law 99-457 and the increasing call for family centered services in early intervention, the need for naturalistic and qualitative methods is becoming increasingly evident. In the naturalistic paradigm, the view of knowledge acquisition as a dynamic, interactive process allows the researcher to document not only what families' attitudes and practices are, but why they exist, and how they change over time. The personal approach of the naturalistic researcher, who, it is often observed, replaces the traditional research instrument (Peshkin, 1988), allows for the gradual development of trust and rapport, through which parents may become comfortable enough to reveal concerns and attitudes that would easily be missed by one-shot, paper and pencil investigations (Daley, 1992). This is particularly true for lower socio-economic groups--those populations typically missed by these methods--and especially for minority groups who, historically, have had considerable reasons for not trusting representatives of society's mainstream.
Another aspect of traditional survey methodology is that a structured questionnaire can only elicit responses to the questions asked, and is, therefore, very much influenced by the underlying premises of the researcher. More open-ended approaches have the capability to find out how the subjects define the issues, rather than mirroring the assumptions of the researcher. This is not to deny that more personalized approaches are also open to bias and require a rigorous self-awareness on the part of the researcher (Peshkin, 1988; Harry, in press).
In applying the foregoing discussion to the question of family literacy interventions, it is suggested the two central challenges are:
As pertains to the first challenge, interventionists must begin by taking into account the likelihood that any formal intervention might create even more stress for the family. There is the stress of having one more set of people to deal with; the stress of having one more activity to do; the stress of having to account to one more person for what you did or did not do; and the stress that results from fearing that your own attempts as well as the intervention may not be successful--that you might, in effect, be a failure one more time.
On the positive side: there is the hope that one more person in your life might help to relieve your stress; that one more activity might be just the thing that will create a long-awaited improvement for your child or family; the reward of receiving approbation for your efforts from someone you respect; and the reward of achieving success for your child, your family, and yourself.
The interventionist who faces these possibilities in planning will do well to begin by gaining a detailed picture of the family's daily life: what are the daily routines of the home, and what is the impact of the child with special needs on those routines? What is the social style of the family? As suggested earlier, Goldenberg, Reese, and Gallimore (1992) have demonstrated the effectiveness of the concept of activity settings as a means of gaining such information. They define activity settings as "the concrete and observable manifestations of leading cultural activities" (p. 500). The researchers collect information on five aspects of the daily activities of families: "the personnel present and available for participation; the cultural goals, values, beliefs, and attitudes that the participants bring to the activity; the immediate motives, purposes, emotions, and intentions guiding the action; the nature of the tasks that are accomplished; and the scripts, normative behaviors, and patterns of appropriate conduct used during the activity" (p. 501). Such information will inform the researcher as to what is likely to fit comfortably into the family schedule. Concerns about fitting into a family's daily schedule are closely tied to my second question--how to fit a design to the family's belief system about literacy. It is not hard to see that an approach that does not fit with the family's beliefs is more likely to create stress and less likely to be successful.
In our increasingly diverse society, with its widening gap between rich and poor, literacy interventions for families are focused on those with children most at risk of school failure--poor and minority children. Researchers concerned with including parents in the development of children's literacy continue to be concerned with an evident discrepancy between the theories of academics and the folk theories and cultural styles of low-income, language minority, and ethnic minority families. As summarized by Goldenberg, Reese, and Gallimore (1992): literacy specialists focus on "meaning based and communicatively based activities with print," while parents interpret literacy as "learning and mastering the orthographic code" (p. 529).
Several studies vividly illustrate this finding (Daisey & Murray, 1991; Delpit, 1988; Goldenberg, Reese & Gallimore, 1992; McLane & McNamee, 1990; Harry, Allen & McLaughlin, in press; Stipek et al., 1992). The studies also strongly suggest that parents' education and/or socio-economic level are the important determinants of these beliefs, rather than culture or ethnicity per se.
Goldenberg et al. (1992) concluded their discussion of the dilemma facing family literacy interventionists with the statement that there are two choices--either to train parents in the desired intervention, or to adapt the intervention to the skills and beliefs of the family. They argue for the latter. "Our intervention plans must be informed by parents' understandings no less than by our own, presumably more scientific ones" (p. 530). Similarly, on the same issue, Delpit (1990) argued that "educators must open themselves to, and allow themselves to be affected by, these alternative voices" (p. 100).
A dual approach could be argued for, particularly one that starts with the parents' skills and knowledge and aims to add to parents' repertoires, as appropriate. This approach takes into account both a respect for parents' views and the belief that parents can learn new strategies (Delgado-Gaitan, 1992). Beliefs about how children learn are perhaps closely tied to child rearing philosophies, and like those philosophies, will not be changed by precept, only by experience. To start where the parents are means that parents will be afforded an opportunity to experience success in helping their children. Indeed, since decoding skills are an essential part of learning to read, why should parents' theories be denigrated? Why shouldn't more meaning-based approaches be introduced as additives to, rather than replacements for, what parents already do?
Goldenberg's study observed that parents were comfortable with a more playful literacy style when they perceived an activity as being a conversational, non-school activity. The view that oral and written traditions are separate, and that the latter belongs to schools, should not be surprising when we note that many minority groups have come from cultures that hold a strong tradition of oral as opposed to written literacy. It seems very likely that parents who see progress in their children's reading and writing can be made aware of the link between oral and written traditions, and will not be averse to increasing their repertoire of literacy activities with their children. Thus, I concur with the conclusion of Goldenberg et al. (1992):
The house of literacy has many rooms, and each room that is constructed makes a contribution to the edifice. Learning letters and sounds and how they combine to form words is a very important part of literacy development, along with reading and talking about whole texts, pretending to read and write, and so on... (p. 530).
It is strongly recommended that family literacy interventions utilize open-ended designs requiring a detailed knowledge of the kinds of adaptations made by families of children with special needs; and further, that the interventions be based on information about families' beliefs and practices regarding literacy. Designs may begin with a phase of ethnographically detailing such aspects of family functioning--and move on to an intervention that fits into the family's activity settings and that builds on parents' existing skills and beliefs. The open-ended design will allow for modifications to the intervention in response to an ongoing evaluation of the projects' success.
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