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This thesis explores media representations of single mothers, and considers how one segment of the audience interprets the messages and ideologies embedded within texts, in relation to their own experiences and perceptions. It combines textual analysis of selected texts from popular television and film with empirical data collected during seminars conducted with groups of teenage, female college students and young single mothers. The texts studied were chosen from television soap opera and situation comedy (both of which deal mainly with family relationships and family situations) and popular, modem Hollywood films; three areas I considered to be central in helping me to gain an understanding of how the media construct meanings and messages for audiences in a form and style designed for repetition and unambiguity, to create easy understanding for audiences, even when they are actually complex and contradictory. The research groups were made up of young women aged between 16 and 20, from a variety of social and ethnic backgrounds. The fieldwork was conducted over a period of several weeks over the five year research period, and used with the case-study texts from contemporary popular culture. The data collected suggests that, beneath the increasingly diverse representations of single mothers in popular culture, media texts tend to define and represent single mothers generally as incomplete, lacking and/or deviant in comparison to ‘normal’ motherhood. However, the young audience members with whom I worked, used the parameters of their own experience and knowledge to simultaneously engage with and distance themselves from the seemingly entrenched ideologies embedded within the texts. As a result it seems that despite the essentially negative representations that continue to dominate media stereotypes of single mothers, young female viewers remain generally aware of and distanced from the messages being transmitted.

Despite a wealth of research in the U.K. on the stock of lone parents, in recent years there has been a lack of research on the dynamics of lone parenthood, particularly leaving lone parenthood. In an attempt to fill this gap, this thesis provides a detailed study of repartnering patterns of lone mothers in the U.K. This study uses the first 14 waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), a nationally representative survey conducted annually which interviews every adult member of a sample of around 5,000 households amounting to around 10,000 individual interviews. This data is particularly advantageous for this study due to its prospective longitudinal nature, allowing lone mothers to be captured at the point of entry into lone motherhood and their repartnering patterns to be analysed over subsequent waves. In addition the data enabled the construction of marital and cohabitation histories for lone mothers in order to control for any effect of prior union history on the probability of repartnering. Employing discrete time event history analysis techniques, the first part of this research examines repartnering among two distinct groups of lone mothers; those entering through the breakdown of a cohabiting or marital union and those entering through the birth of a child whilst single and never-married. Of particular interest is the effect of these different routes of entry into lone motherhood on the timing and determinants of repartnering and the types of new unions formed. The second part of the study seeks to identify if repartnering is associated with improved well-being for lone mothers. Using a series of pooled logistic regression models this thesis explores the association of repartnering with transitions in three domains: economic, demographic and health. Amongst those entering lone motherhood through the breakdown of a previous partnership the most important determinant of repartnering is found to be age at entry into lone motherhood. However, the economic situation of a lone mother, in particular whether or not she was receiving Income Support, has a much stronger influence on repartnering among single never married lone mothers than age. The duration of lone motherhood is found to be similar for both types of lone mother, -estimated at around five years, however controlling for a number of demographic and socio-economic factors suggests the probability of repartnering is lower for those entering through the breakdown of a cohabitation compared with those entering through the dissolution of a marriage. There appears to be a preference for cohabitation over marriage with nearly three quarters of those who repartnered moving into a cohabiting union. However, the higher chance of moving into a marriage for those who were previously married appears to result from a high proportion reconciling with a former partner. Examining the relationship between repartnering and other transitions occurring in three domains reveals that repartnering is likely to occur against a backdrop of other changes. Repartnering is strongly associated with an improvement in financial situation, residential mobility and an increase in the number of resident dependent children. Although no direct link is found between repartnering and improved mental health outcomes, the strong association between improved financial well-being and an improvement in mental health indicates repartnering may be indirectly related to better mental health. However, the finding of a direct association between poorer mental health and repartnering warrants further investigation