Big M.A. Project Overview

[ailiathena]

That pic up there? That's one that one of my informants took while I was getting my recorder set up to interview her. It is going to be my official MA thesis/fieldwork icon

Comments

Project overview

[anonymous]

What a great overview! And you are getting clearer and clearer.
Now I have a way of sharing with friends more succinctly than I could explain from your explanation to me what you are about. thanks!

[adfamiliares]

Sounds fascinating. Do the variations you see in how age is experienced by your young mothers align with other differences (e.g. age, race, family situation), or do they seem to vary independently in all directions?

[ailiathena]

It seems to matter, but in intersectional ways, so that saying This Age Mostly Does This isn't actually that helpful. The factors that are standing out to me right now are 1) where you're living (with parents, with partner, alone, or some combination thereof), 2) income (working? how much?), and 3) school status. On the other hand, no two people have the same situation. For example, I have 3 white girls who are 20 and all three have strong relationships with the fathers' of their children (even tho their pregnancies were unplanned). But on the domicile, job, and school fronts, they are quite different, and thus have pretty radically different senses of what age they are and what it means.
Still, being of young enough to be in high school - and still being in high school - definitely changes things re: perceptions of age. And I think class changes how families perceive sharing resources, which doesn't lead to any similarity in shared living but does seem to change how people think about age and experience their pregnancy/parenting.