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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    20 Families in Trouble It was made plain from the outset that absolute anonymity was guaranteed not only for the period of the study but permanently The validity of the personal approach, and of the guarantee of anonymity was established later by the statement of several family members. We talked it over after you left the ßrst time. Nor ah said you seemed like a decent guy with troubles of your own and she sorta liked to talk to you. I said Hell, he wont hurt us any if he keeps his mouth shut and I guess he will. Гт willing to talk to him again if it'll help any. Fact is, we were kinda glad to see you come back. Mina and I fìgured maybe we shouldn't talk with you again, just say we'd changed our minds. Then I remembered your telling about your wife being in the hospital and the mess you were in, so I said If he can open up like that, I guess I can, too. Anyway, you'd promised nobody'd ever know what we told you. A different value inherent in this ''conscious technique of being a human being is indicated in a later statement by the wife in one family. It was good just to talk to somebody who understood—to tell the truth and not worry if the relief [the Department of Welfare Investigator] would be mad because we did what we did. Why wouldn't we talk about how troubles make our lives different, when we know it wouldn't hurt us? Most of the families, despite their surface acceptance of the study, needed to be visited more than once before the necessary degree of rapport was established. Here, too, a later statement was revealing. You see, it isn't easy to be honest with a stranger. We had to feel you weren't a stranger, but we still felt it the second time you came. Then, when you talked about your house in the country and 19. The guarantee has been kept. Checking with the famihes, fifty-seven of which could be located seventeen months after the close of the field work period, showed that no family had any cause for concern in this respect.
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