INTERVIEW CODING PROTOCOL

All interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim into text. The transcripts were then parsed into meaning units, typically a sentence or paragraph on a common subject, and coded into one of the themes detailed here. A meaning unit was usually assigned exclusively to one code, but on occasion the comments of participants included multiple meanings and were assigned multiple codes as appropriate. For example, in speaking of her 23-year-old niece, Aunt Rebecca shared the following: “[My niece] is bright and she seems to have great aptitude with math, and she wanted to be a math teacher for a long time. … I've tried to really encourage her … and I think it's nice for women to be in math and science fields, because there's not many of them, and her mom sort of discourages her.” In this example, Aunt Rebecca is clearly being supportive of her niece (Code 3.1: General support), but at the same time she is mentoring a nontraditional gender identity on the part of her niece (Code 3.5: Mentoring gender) and supplementing the likely position of her niece's mother, as Rebecca implies in the last sentence (Code 2.2: Supplemental parenting).

The coding scheme allows us to describe the dramatis personae and identify common themes that appear in their relationships. Most of the themes were anticipated, and specific interview questions were purposefully designed to explore particular issues (e.g., mentoring and family work). Some themes were entirely unanticipated and developed in the course of the study.