Social support and motherhood : the natural history of a research project /

Oakley began a research project in 1983 to investigate the possibility that a "supportive" presence for pregnant women might improve infant birthweights. The short answer is that it took several years of intensive study and cost a lot of money to find out that it did not. The longer response, the subject of this book, is occasionally didatic, sometimes digressive, and statistically incomplete, but is nonetheless well worth reading. The project is, in fact, ideally suited for use as a case study in a sociology or health sciences methods course precisely because Oakley considers no detail of its history irrelevant. Clearly and cogently written, the limited treatment of quantitative data is, in this context, an attractive and even useful feature of the work. The book provides thickly descriptive accounts of several aspects of the project: the processes involved in generating, developing, funding, and carrying through the research project; methodological, social, and ethical issues and considerations involved in working with subjects and in collecting and analyzing data; and ethnographic accounts of the perspectives and standpoints of the principal investigator and her research assistants as well as of their subjects. All levels. N. B. Rosenthal; SUNY College at Old Westbury