Families in trouble / Earl Lomon Koos.

  • Koos, Earl Lomon, 1905-1960
Date:
1946
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Families in trouble / Earl Lomon Koos. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    APPENDIX Interviewing in This Study It has been a source of satisfaction to those concerned with this study that so high a percentage of famihes approached agreed to participate. The granting of repeated interviews by sixty-two out of a total of eighty-one famihes approached seems exceptional for such unprepared-for interviews.^ This high rate is especially satisfactory in view of the highly personal nature of the present inquiry. The literature on interviewing stresses the importance of certain qualifications on the part of the interviewer. For example, Professor Burgess indicates his belief in the following as essential: The primary requisite of the seeker after personal documents is a sense for the dramatic in all human life, a sympathy broad enough to encompass the manifold diverse manifestations of hu¬ man nature, even those that are commonly regarded as shocking or even outrageous. My own experience as well as observation of the success and failure of students seems to show that the inhibi¬ tions to personal revelations are not generally so much in the 1. In the course of several years' work on this area—on this study, on studies for the Kips Bay-Yorkville District Health Committee, for the National Re¬ search Council's Committee on Food Habits, and for the Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine in Cornell University's College of Medicine— the viriter has approached without pre-arrangement more than 2000 families. In this total number the rate of acceptance varied with the subject matter and with different approaches but averaged not more than 55 acceptances per 100 approaches, as contrasted with a rate of about 76 per 100 approaches in the present study.
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