Preface

This research project has gone through some interesting transformations. Our original grant application to the William T. Grant Foundation proposed a year of qualitative research followed by a year of quantitative research. We were very grateful when the foundation’s then senior vice president, Robert Granger, encouraged us to focus on the qualitative portion only.

We hadn’t expected to be taken by surprise by the nature of the three after-school centers that we were going to study, but we were. A few years earlier, we had studied six Boys and Girls Clubs and had written two books based on that experience: Hirsch’s A Place to Call Home: After–School Programs for Urban Youth, and Deutsch’s Pride in the Projects: Teens Building Identities in Urban Contexts. We had thought that the clubs in the current research would be reasonably similar to the six we had studied earlier, but that was not the case. With one of the clubs (referred to as North River), it was clear from the very beginning that it was a lot worse than any of the clubs we had come to know previously. Nothing during the rest of our year of data collection served to change our mind about this. Indeed, as time went on, we became more sharply aware of differences across all three of the clubs. We became convinced that to do justice to this situation, we needed to expand our research focus. Our initial objective was to conduct an intensive study of youth-staff relationships, as such relationships had emerged as an important factor in our prior studies. We have done that. But we also added an organizational level of analysis to capture the different cultures and operations at the three sites. The varying perspectives are reported via case studies of each club and of two youth at each club. The book that grew out of this more comprehensive effort is richer, and it is both more theoretical and more applied as a result.