The 104 volunteers for this study included aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews who were interviewed in their homes, offices, or occasionally in a public café. The interviews ranged widely from under a half hour to nearly two hours. Often the volunteers had much to say in response to my questions about their experience being an uncle or aunt, niece or nephew. In all, I recorded more than 83 hours of material, which was later transcribed verbatim into text files. Here I describe the volunteers in some detail, the kinds of questions I asked, and the method I used to come to some understanding of what they shared. Some readers may be more interested in the actual findings and less in the details of the inquiry's design. Feel free to move right along to the findings presented in the chapters that follow.

THE DESIGN OF THE STUDY

Because we know so little about what aunts and uncles do, or how nieces and nephews experience uncling or aunting, the most direct approach seemed the most appropriate. I simply asked them to describe their relationships in their own words. In this way, the data of the study are the voiced experiences of participants. Experiences include descriptions of how often they visited, chatted by phone, or e-mailed. Some were in frequent contact, some were not. Some were exceptionally close and described relationships like that between a parent and son or daughter, or between intimate friends.