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Single Black Mothers’ Role Strain and Adaptation across the Life Course

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Abstract

This study examines how Black single mothers maintain resiliency, despite having family provider role strain (e.g., low income, joblessness, and underemployment). Guided by a strengths-based role strain and adaptation approach that addresses how ethnic-specific strengths facilitate resiliency across the life course, we extend Bowman and Sanders (Journal of Comparative Family Studies 29:39–56, 1998) work on Black unmarried fathers. We focus on the role of strong religious beliefs and extended family closeness in protecting psychological functioning, despite having family provider role difficulties. Multivariate analyses were conducted on a sub-sample of 617 single Black mothers using the National Survey of Black Americans, a national probability sample survey which includes data from 2,107 face-to-face interviews. The early postindustrial era of the late 1970s and 1980s created critical and unprecedented provider role challenges because both Black men and women faced the highest levels of joblessness and economic marginality since the Great Depression of the 1930s. As hypothesized, strong religious beliefs and extended family closeness operated as significant protective factors promoting more resilient outcomes—a sense of personal efficacy, self-esteem, and life satisfaction. These theory-driven findings can also guide future policy-relevant research on more complex provider role strain–adaptation processes among Black mothers facing chronic poverty during the 2007 Great Recession and beyond.

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Notes

  1. In the subgroup study, age is not included as a covariate but as a basis for the major life stage analysis. Therefore, in the preliminary analysis of the model for the total sample, age was entered last rather than first to explore its effects without altering the theory driven model as compared in the various life stage subgroups. However, we did compare the results of entering age before the other predictors and the results of controlling age in the full model for different outcomes. The position of age variable is not an influential case for the results.

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Correspondence to Ruby Mendenhall.

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Mendenhall, R., Bowman, P.J. & Zhang, L. Single Black Mothers’ Role Strain and Adaptation across the Life Course. J Afr Am St 17, 74–98 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-012-9220-7

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