THOMAS
COOK
Managing to Make it: Urban Families in High-Risk Neighborhoods (with Frank F. Furstenberg, Jacquelynn Eccles, Glenn H. Elder, and Arnold Sameroff). University of Chicago Press (1999).
One myth about families in inner-city neighborhoods is that they are characterized by poor parenting. This interdisciplinary study explodes this and other misconceptions about success, parenting, and socioeconomic advantage. Based on nearly 500 interviews and qualitative case studies of families in inner-city Philadelphia, the book reveals how parents and their teenage children managed different levels of resources and dangers in low-income neighborhoods and how familes and communities contributed to the development of children. The survey results and qualitative analyses describe the creative means parents use to manage the risks and opportunities in their communities and the strategies they develop to steer their children away from risk and toward resources that foster positive development and lead to success.
The authors find that poor parenting is not necessarily more common in disadvantaged neighborhoods and explains why neighborhood advantage is not invariably linked to success. It also offers a wealth of information about programs, services, and policy decisions that should be valuable to policymakers, sociologists, educators, and others concerned with the fate of the urban poor. The book launches the MacArthur Foundation Studies on Successful Adolescent Development, a series that focuses on how and why youth are able to overcome--rather than succumb to--social disadvantages.
Other Books By Cook:
Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference (with William R. Shadish and Donals T. Campbell). Houghton-Mifflin (2001).
Losing Generations: Adolescents in High Risk Settings (with J. Handler et al.) National Academy Press (1993).