To answer the questions that emerged from the review of the previous research in Chapter 1, a study was designed that would obtain a vast amount of data on a moderate-sized sample of families. We needed measures of parent–child interaction, childrearing attitudes and behaviors, the father's role in the family, the marital relationship, parents' gender-role attitudes, the mother's sense of well-being, demographic variables, and the mother's employment history. In addition, the study required measures of the child's attitudes, self-concepts, and perceptions of their families, as well as independent measures of the child's social and academic competence. Thus, we obtained an extensive data set from multiple sources.

In this chapter, we describe the basic design and methodology of this research. The details of the statistical analyses and descriptions of specific measures are taken up in individual chapters.

The chapter begins with an explanation for our choice of the study's location and our decision about the age of the children who would be the focus of this investigation. We then go on to describe the site and the sample. The sample description is complicated because, although data are obtained for 675 children, the basic sample consists of the 553 children for whom we had the necessary demographic data. For most of the analyses, however, we use only the 369 families for whom we obtained the full set of data. Following the description of the sample selection process, we explain the data collection procedures and the major measures used in the study.