Hope springs maternal: A study of the meaning of shelter use among two groups of mothers.
Item
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Title
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Hope springs maternal: A study of the meaning of shelter use among two groups of mothers.
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Identifier
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AAI3115251
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identifier
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3115251
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Creator
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Gerson, Jill.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Andrea Savage
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Date
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2004
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Social Work | Sociology, Public and Social Welfare | Sociology, Individual and Family Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation is about mothers without homes, some of whom had been in out-of-home placement. The purpose of this study was to explore the need for, meaning of, and coping strategies related to shelter use among mothers who had experienced a range of disruptive experiences in childhood and adolescence. Participants were primarily young, pregnant women or mothers with very young children. Twelve of the mothers had been in out-of-home placement and twelve of the mothers had not been in out-of-home placement. This exploratory study used a qualitative methodology to focus on the way in which socioeconomic context and interpersonal experience shaped individual and collective biographies.;Study findings indicate more similarities than differences between the two groups of women. For most participants, shelter use was closely related to current economic realities with which many poor women of color contend. Participants were proactive in using social welfare programs to meet their family's needs when there were few viable alternatives. In addition, life course concerns, maturational thrusts, and quality of social relationships were important factors related to shelter use. Women perceived transitional shelter use as a way to negotiate adult status and provide their children with more stability and developmental opportunity than had been available to them.;Salient differences between the two study subgroups included more extensive uprooting and developmental affronts for women who had been in substitute care than for women who had not been in care. A second difference was that women who had been sexually abused and women who had been in serial placements were more pessimistic about their futures than those who experienced stable caretaking, whether or not they were in out-of home care.;The study suggests that, for this group of young women, the confluence of shelter use with maturational thrusts can be both a positive experience and an opportunity to develop a range of social, parenting, and interpersonal skills, when their choices and hopes for themselves and their children are validated, and are understood as consonant with social expectations.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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D.S.W.
