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M.A. (Social Work) / The study focuses on the meaning of divorce for mothers of divorced women, and consists of two parts : * A review of literature related to the extended family, social networks, research, families of origin and divorce; * an empirical investigation. During the latter, practicing social workers assisted with the identification of the sample group consisting of 25 mothers. The major findings of the empirical part of the study are summarised as follows On the whole mothers reported that : At an early stage of their daughters marriage they were aware of the likelihood that the marriage would end in divorce; - approximately 50 percent of mothers maintained a stable relationship with their son-in-laws after the divorce; - the most common reaction of mothers after having been informed of the divorce was one of sorrow and the second most common reaction interestingly enough was relief that the divorce would bring an end to disharmony; - the mothers preferred to discuss the divorce of a daughter with a family member for emotional support; - most mothers found it necessary to financially uphold their daughters after the divorce; - sixty-eight percent of the mothers accepted the divorce of a daughter within one year after the divorce took place...

Interest in child care has grown dramatically, yet little is known about how families manage to ensure appropriate child care. In a secondary analysis of data from 642 employed mothers representing a wide range of income levels, this research identified the factors contributing most to mothers' satisfaction with child care arrangements. The study used an ecological model with accessibility, affordability, quality, and workplace flexibility as characteristics of the exosystem, and household income, presence of a spouse or partner, and age of the youngest child as characteristics of the microsystem. The research explored how individual family characteristics combine with environmental characteristics to impact parental satisfaction. Three questions guided the study: (a) How do accessibility, affordability, quality of child care arrangements, and workplace flexibility affect parental satisfaction with child care arrangements? (b) How do income, household structure, and child's age affect parental satisfaction with child care arrangements? (c) How do these characteristics combine to affect parental satisfaction with child care arrangements? As proposed, the study found that for most mothers in the study, accessibility and quality combine with income and household structure to impact satisfaction with child care arrangements. Poorer women who pay a greater percentage of household income had more concerns about quality and were more dissatisfied with their child care arrangement than women paying a lower percentage of income for care. Despite concerns about quality for mothers paying a greater percentage of income for care, affordability contributed more than quality to satisfaction with child care. The data provided evidence of a different trade-off for lower income families. The results of this study have relevance for policies which address the needs of families at all income levels. The policy principles based on the results of the study include: 1. Basic health and safety regulations are important to quality and stability of care for all parents. 2. Financial assistance with the cost of child care is important, especially for those working families just above the poverty level. 3. Public support of services to improve child care is important to addressing the needs of all employed mothers, regardless of income status. / Graduation date: 1996

The national health promotion goals for increasing breastfeeding initiation rates to at least 75% of all mothers and six month breastfeeding continuation rates of at least 50% by the year 2000 do not seem to be obtainable. These goals require new insight into what motivates a new mother to continue to breastfeed. This study identified perceived social support and interpersonal dependency as potential factors associated to lactation duration, based upon the previous breastfeeding experience of the mother. Inexperienced breastfeeding mothers perceived more total support, task support and informational support than mothers with previous breastfeeding experience. This study did not correlate the amount of perceived support to lactation duration. An ancillary finding was that women providing a combination of breast milk and artificial baby milk feeds had a significantly higher lack of social self-confidence than mothers providing breastmilk exclusively. / Department of Family and Consumer Sciences

D.Litt. et Phil. (Psychology) / Asthma, which affects persons from early childhood to adulthood, is an old, potentially fatal, worldwide disease but still of increasing prevalence and still with no evidence that the condition can be cured. For patients whose symptoms are severe and intractable the condition can be particularly disruptive causing major changes in daily living and severely impinging upon not only the quality of the individual's life but that of the entire family as well.

In this thesis, I examine the experiences of breastfeeding mothers who chose to give birth with Certified Professional Midwives at a free-standing birth center, and the factors that influence their known high rates of breastfeeding initiation and duration. Using grounded theory and data collected from participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and an open-ended survey, I describe the functioning of the birth center and the breastfeeding explanatory models of the birth center staff as well as how the birth center's model of care affects client-participant's experiences of breastfeeding in community that rejects medicalized models of birth and breastfeeding. Findings interpreted from a biocultural perspective reveal how women utilize previously constructed breastfeeding convictions to navigate support and difficulties in a way that allows 92% of client-participants to report overall happiness about their breastfeeding experiences. There was, however, a small subset of women who were disappointed in their breastfeeding experience. Recommendations include changes in care practice to further support breastfeeding women in this community. / Graduation date: 2013

Research has shown that both males and females agree that child-support payments should be consistent. However, census bureau data has indicated that nonpayment of child support is a significant problem in the United States. This study investigated the ways in which females make sense of the phenomenon of child support nonpayment via the construction of personal narratives.Ten adult females were interviewed to obtain stories of child-support nonpayment. The interviews were recorded and transcribed and discrete narratives were isolated for analysis. The constant comparative method was used to compare and contrast the data in order to discover the themes inherent to the process of sense-making through the construction of personal narratives.The analysis revealed three categories of narratives of child-support nonpayment: Action, Coping, and Prescriptive. The findings suggested that each of the categories revealed salient dimensions (i.e., themes) inherent to those categories. Furthermore, these themes were utilized to assign meaning to, and hence make sense of, the experience of child-support nonpayment. / Department of Speech Communication

This research explored Korean mothers’ meaning of school readiness, the process of the meaning construction, and their educational practices based on their meaning of school readiness. The research was conceptually and theoretically based on a social constructivist approach (Graue, 1993; Meisels, 1999) and Bourdieu’s conceptions of economic, cultural, and social capitals, respectively (Bourdieu, 2001). For the study, 21 Korean mothers from two kindergartens placed in two different SES communities in Seoul, Korea, participated in this study. Multiple strategies such as questionnaire, interviews, and group discussion were employed. According to the findings of this study, the meaning of school readiness to both groups of mothers involved academic and social preparation. However, it was revealed that more focus was put on academic preparation than social preparation in their every day lives. The meaning of children’s school readiness for the Korean mothers was deeply constituted within and constituted Korea’s social and cultural contexts. In terms of the SES differences in the meaning of school readiness, the community standard for extracurricular education in the lower SES community, is less than that of the higher SES community. Lower SES mothers’ lack of financial, social and cultural capitals rather than their lack of value for those classes was a primary hindrance in providing their children with such an education. This study also confirmed the significance of the ready school and the ready community in relation to children’s school readiness (Graue, 2006; Pianta et al., 1999; Wesley & Buysse, 2003). As for the process of meaning construction, mothers in both groups reported that they collected information mostly from “other mothers.” However, “other mothers” for the higher SES mothers were the mothers of their children’s friends, while for lower SES mothers, they were mothers in the neighborhood who had already sent their children to elementary school. Mothers of their children’s friends as the most powerful information sources particularly among higher SES mothers point to the importance of the mothers’ social relations with “intergenerational closure” in their children’s education (Carbonaro, 1999; Coleman, 1988; Horvat et al., 2003). Moreover, Korean mothers reported that they are affected by reports of various media such as TV, newspaper, magazines, books, and the internet. Kin was also influential information source for lower SES mothers, which was consistent with Lareau’s study (2003). / text

Adolescent mothers are a vulnerable population for a multitude of reasons. For one, adolescent mothers concurrently undergo two significant developmental phases and transitions: adolescence and parenting. Adolescence is the psychosocial period of adjustment marked by dramatic neural, hormonal, cognitive, psychological, physical, and biological changes. While adolescence is a time of cognitive advancement, it is also a time of stress, identity development, peer pressure, mood disruptions, and emotion regulation difficulties. While parenthood presents with positive changes, it simultaneously introduces challenges, such as increases in caretaking responsibilities, time commitment, and distress. Additionally, as statistics have shown, many adolescent mothers face a host of risk factors (e.g., poverty, low socioeconomic status (SES), and low educational attainment), making these “adolescent mothers at risk (AMARs)” a highly vulnerable population. Adolescence is also a time when substance use initiation and experimentation occur. While some level of substance use is normative among adolescents, substance use is especially detrimental for adolescent mothers and their children. According to the literature, substance-using mothers differ from their non-substance-using counterparts in terms of how the former parent their children. For example, substance-using mothers tend to display decreased levels of warmth (Barnow, Schuckit, Lucht, John, & Freyberger, 2002; Gruber and Taylor, 2006; Mayes & Truman, 2002; Suchman et al., 2007) as well as extreme styles of parenting (e.g., minimal supervision and intolerant attitudes) (Suchman & Luthar, 2000). This dissertation used archived data to examine AMARs and explore their levels of distress tolerance, substance use, and parenting attitudes and beliefs. Specifically, this dissertation sought to address the following questions: Is there an association between distress tolerance, substance use, and parenting attitudes and beliefs? Does substance use mediate the association between distress tolerance and parenting attitudes and beliefs? Seventy-two mothers living in nine Transitional Living Programs (TLPs) across a Northeast state were interviewed. Participants were aged 16-22 years with a mean age of 19. Participants were predominantly Latino and African American, and nearly half of the participants reported having a history of living in foster care or group home with an average of five years spent in these institutions. Data were collected from the baseline interview of a pilot randomized control trial examining an intervention for increasing positive parenting among homeless AMARs. Distress tolerance was operationalized via the Distress Tolerance Scale (Simons & Gaher, 2005), and parenting attitudes and beliefs were operationalized through the Adult Adolescent Parenting Inventory-2 (Bavolek & Keene, 2010). Lifetime and recent frequency of substance use was also examined. Race/ethnicity was controlled for in all analyses because the past literature has documented racial/ethnic minority adolescent mothers experiencing more adversities and vulnerabilities compared to their White counterparts (Huang et al., 2014, 2019). Consistent with the literature, we found an association between distress tolerance and substance use, substance use and parenting attitudes and beliefs, as well as distress tolerance and parenting attitudes and beliefs. Specifically, there was an association between low distress tolerance and high levels of substance use; high levels of substance use and poor parenting attitudes and beliefs; and low distress tolerance and poor parenting attitudes and beliefs. In terms of the mediation analysis, only substance use within the past six months mediated the relationship between distress tolerance and parenting attitudes and beliefs. In other words, low distress tolerance led to higher levels of substance use within the past six months, which in turn led to poorer parenting attitudes and beliefs. One implication of the results is that recent substance use, rather than lifetime history, has a more salient effect on parenting attitudes and beliefs. Overall, the majority of the AMARs in the current study’s sample demonstrated resilience and had scores reflective of positive parenting attitudes and beliefs despite their notably low levels of distress tolerance. While the results of the study are promising, they should be interpreted with caution considering several limitations, including a small effect size from the mediation analysis and potential underreporting among AMARs. Future research should continue to explore various iterations of the research question (e.g., different combinations of distress tolerance, substance use, and parenting attitudes and beliefs as the independent, mediating, and outcome variables) and psychometric properties of the measures utilized.

Despite many international and local attempts to end the practice of FGM/C, this practice continues to flourish in Nigeria and thus has a negative impact on the lives of girls and women on a daily basis. Furthermore, female genital mutilation is a serious form of violence against girls, women, and children that must be abolished worldwide. This study primarily sought to understand the sociocultural factors that influence the mothers' attitudes towards the continuation of FGM/C in Nigeria. The study used the theory of planned behaviour developed by Ajzen which proposes three distinct constructs as drivers of intention. This theory was deemed to be suitable for the study since sociocultural factors that contribute to the continuation of FGM in relation to mothers’ attitudes toward the practice can be interpreted or linked to the determinants of intention. In addition, this study used secondary data analysis and relied largely on reliable secondary sources.