Essay On Single Motherhood

A Book review of Edin, Kathryn and Maria Kefalas. 2007. Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Introduction

The increase in single parenthood creates another phenomena of the restructuring of the American family. Poor mothers who deviate from the middle class norms of marriage and childbearing are continuously blamed by politicians and the general population in public discourse as the reason for the existence of poverty. Nonetheless, the authors, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, take it upon themselves to present the many stories of 162 young, low-income single mothers living in the most impoverished communities of Philadelphia and the neighboring city of Camden, New Jersey to understand the reasons why single parenthood has mushroomed since the 1950's. Edin and Kefalas provide great insight not only about motherhood in low-income communities, but their pursuit to postpone marriage while choosing not to delay childbearing. It is through this ethnographic study that we see the emergence of a redefinition of marriage in American society that not only has come to affect low-income families, as we might conclude, but middle-class families as well. Edin and Kefalas research goes beyond the preconceived notions of low-income single mothers welfare dependency and provides them with a sense of freedom and to a certain extent autonomy from the ideology of the typical American family.

Summary

The authors original aim is to find out why poor women from low-income neighborhoods decide to have children out of wedlock and why don't they marry. The authors aim diverged from their original thesis and became more focused on seeking an explanation to understand the roles t...

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... in the book may only pertain to the population of interest and thus may be futile for the rest of the population. Lastly, the individuals in the sample may not have an objectifiable understanding of what is occurring in their own lives.

The second problem that I saw with this study was reliability and validity. The authors conducted an ethnography study using direct unstructured interviews and intense participatory observation. These methods allow researchers to attain in-depth information as oppose to using surveys or censuses. As a result, the authors were able to find unexpected information and insight. The problem is that yes the authors conducted repeated qualitative interviews, but it does not achieve reliability or validity because I noticed that the situations of these poor single mothers usually changed and presents unstable information.

Conclusion