“Sometimes you have to pop them”: Conflict and Meaning-Making in a Parenting Class

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maia Cucchiara
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
African American Mothers ◽  
Physical Force ◽  
Childhood Poverty ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
Parenting Class ◽  
Therapeutic Frame

Abstract Parenting education is designed to address problems associated with childhood poverty, but such programs have had limited success. This ethnographic study of a parenting class serving low-income African American mothers examines tensions between parents and instructors over the use of physical force in disciplining children or in resolving conflicts more broadly. The article uses the concept of cultural frames to analyze how parents and instructors understood the issues at stake, showing significant differences between the frame the instructors used (discouraging all forms of force) and that of the parents (who saw force as sometimes necessary and effective). The instructors' therapeutic frame positioned children as vulnerable and prioritized self-esteem and positive relationships, and it did not resonate with parents, whose protective frame emphasized their responsibility to keep children safe in a dangerous world. This study examines interactions between parents and instructors to show that when frames come into conflict in social settings, collective affirmation of a particular frame can be a source of resistance and solidarity, thus raising questions about the potential of anti-poverty interventions that do not pay attention to context or meaning making.

scholarly journals Literacy, power, and affective (dis)encounter: An ethnographic study on a low-income community in Spain

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. e0252782
Author(s):  
Elena Guichot-Muñoz ◽  
María Jesús Balbás-Ortega ◽  
Eduardo García-Jiménez
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
New Literacy ◽  
New Literacy Studies ◽  
Literacy Process ◽  
Teaching Learning

In areas of social exclusion, there are greater risks of facing discrimination at school. The teaching-learning processes may contribute toward the perpetuation of this inequality. This research analyzes a literacy event that takes place in a low-income school in Southern Spain. The new literacy studies have come to examine how power relationships and affective bonds work in such literacy practices. An ethnographic method was followed to facilitate a deeper understanding of multimodal literacy. Further, a social semiotics multimodal approach was adopted to analyze the meaning-making social process that takes place in the classroom. The participants comprised two teachers and 17 children, whose ages range from 5 to 7 years. Data were collected in the form of reports, audio recordings, video recordings, and photographs over a two-years period. The results obtained have revealed that the children have been taught writing and reading through a dominant orthodox model that fails to consider the community’s and families’ cultural capitals. They also show that the literacy process does not grant any affective quality. Neither is there an authentic dialogic space created between the school and the community. This lack of dialogue generates an inequality in the actual acquisition of comprehensive reading and writing skills at school, with instances of groups exclusion, owing to the anti-hegemonic practices of knowledge acquisition.

How Low-Income Mothers Seek Quality Health Care for Their Children: An Ethnographic Study

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marquia Blackmon ◽  
Sherry C. Eaton ◽  
Linda M. Burton ◽  
Whitney Welsh ◽  
Dwayne Brandon ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Quality Health Care ◽  
Quality Health ◽  
Low Income Mothers

scholarly journals Not ‘my economy’: A political ethnographic study of interest in the economy

2021 ◽  
pp. 136914812110070
Author(s):  
Anna Killick
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Low Incomes ◽  
The Rich

Some political economists explain the apparent downplaying of the importance of economic issues in political events such as Brexit with reference to the growing anger or despair people on low incomes feel about the economy. This ‘everyday political economy’ article draws on an ethnographic study conducted between 2016 and 2018 with residents of an English city to explore what people think about the phenomenon of the economy. It reveals significant differences in how interested high- and low-income participants are in the economy and its role as a bedrock for welfare. Low-income participants are more negative about the economy, particularly contesting politicians’ claims that it is distinct from the human sphere, when they view it as controlled by the rich. However, reasoning is based on post-2008 crisis economic conditions, and any lack of interest in the economy may be more calculative and temporary than is often assumed.

scholarly journals “I’ll Tell You What You Need to Know.” How Respondents Negotiate the Sense of Meaning- Making—Methodological Reflections from the Field Based on Ethnographic Study of Lesbian Parenting in Poland

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-139
Author(s):  
Magdalena Wojciechowska
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Comfort Zone ◽  
Know How ◽  
Research Participants ◽  
Lesbian Parenting ◽  
Shed Light

The aim of this paper is to shed light on how various interactional and interpretational contexts arising from specific researcher—research participants relationship established in the course of doing ethnographic study on sensitive, and thus often enough resistant to immediate cognition, phenomenon, namely, lesbian parenting in Poland, as well as different ways of embracing these, may factor into the research process. Drawing on specific dilemmas I encountered while doing the study at hand—from engaging a hard-to-reach population that, in a sense, wished to be reached, and the consequences thereof; through being pushed out of the comfort zone as the women under study, in the wake of becoming acquainted with the analysis I offered, “switched” from narrating their “in-orderto motives” to reflecting on the “because motives” behind their actions; to contextualizing emotions arising as my response to experiencing the issues they face (on a daily basis), to name a few—my goal here is to discuss how different ways of collecting and analyzing data—in the context of developing rapport with the women under study—have had an impact on conceptualizing and (re)framing the data at hand.

scholarly journals Childhood poverty and adult psychological well-being

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (52) ◽  
pp. 14949-14952 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary W. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Internalizing Symptoms ◽  
Allostatic Load ◽  
Physiological Stress ◽  
Longitudinal Design ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Psychological Well Being ◽  
Childhood Poverty ◽  
Childhood Disadvantage ◽  
Prospective Longitudinal

Childhood disadvantage has repeatedly been linked to adult physical morbidity and mortality. We show in a prospective, longitudinal design that childhood poverty predicts multimethodological indices of adult (24 y of age) psychological well-being while holding constant similar childhood outcomes assessed at age 9. Adults from low-income families manifest more allostatic load, an index of chronic physiological stress, higher levels of externalizing symptoms (e.g., aggression) but not internalizing symptoms (e.g., depression), and more helplessness behaviors. In addition, childhood poverty predicts deficits in adult short-term spatial memory.

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