ABSTRACT

Many of us who study the work and family lives of children and families hope that our work makes a difference. We care about doing the most rigorous research, about adding to theory and knowledge, but we also care about the children and families who are the subjects and objects of our studies. We hope that—in some measure—their lives are improved by the hours we spend developing the hypotheses that form the basis of our inquiries; constructing the models that then inform our research; translating these models into valid constructs and measures; administering questionnaires or observational procedures; and then poring over the findings to find the story behind the numbers.