Many lone mothers experience significant hardship in their lives, yet some appear resilient in the face of adversity. Understandings of lone mothers' resilience are necessary to develop effective policies and programs; however, research in this area is lacking, including understanding factors that both create hardship, and protect against it. Grounded in a feminist, participatory methodology this study addresses these gaps by engaging 38 Canadian lone mothers' in interviews and focus groups to explore their understandings and experience of resilience. Lone mothers identify a breadth of risk and protective factors organized here into a social exclusion framework so that their compounding and intersecting nature may be more readily identified. The findings shed light on important risk and protective factors in the lives of low income lone mothers and such improved understanding perhaps contests the negative and too readily made judgments about these families.
This paper presents the findings from community focus groups, comprised of social service users, and explores the characteristics of effective social workers. Focus groups were conducted as part of a case study to inform a Master of Social Work (MSW) curriculum review at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Faculty of Social Work. Wilfrid Laurier University has two MSW programs—the MSW Aboriginal Field of Study (AFS) and a non-Aboriginal program. The case for this study was the non-Aboriginal MSW program. Ongoing program evaluation that includes feedback from service users honours the knowledge of marginalized communities, and is an accreditation requirement of the Canadian Association for Social Work Education (CASWE). Four focus groups were conducted with a total of 24 individuals who access programs from human service organizations that provide supportive housing, immigrant, or refugee services in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. Service users identified numerous characteristics of effective social workers, including kindness, cultural awareness, and strong communication skills, as well as the need to articulate and address issues of professional suitability. We conclude by querying whether the typical assessment of MSW students’ suitability for the profession is adequate, and provide the AFS wholistic and comprehensive evaluation as an example of an alternative approach to MSW student assessment.
This paper explores theoretical and conceptual developments in our understanding of resilience as these apply to single mother-led families. Rather than the earlier and simpler notion that resilience implied 'bouncing back' we suggest, consistent with work by other resilience scholars, that the varied demonstrations of resilience are a 'changing of the game'. By this we mean that resilience involves the creation of new outcomes, or, new ways of being through constant adaptation. Further, we argue this transformation to resilient ways of being occurs across all categories of resilience. This is a significant contribution of this work as we submit that even for those single mothers who appear to be just coping, their behaviours manifest significant and strategic adaptation. This important finding suggests critically new and important ways in which the life experiences and adaptive responses of single mothers should be perceived. The findings and analyses offered here derive from feminist, participatory research with 18 single mothers in focus groups and 20 in semi-structured interviews. Following the requisite ethics review processes and ensuring the confidentiality of all data, we utilized this extensive data set to examine these mothers' responses to their experiences of adversity. These included the transitions associated with family break up, solo parenting, the stigma associated with being a single mom, loss of financial security (which often necessitated social assistance receipt) and for some, coping with abuse-induced trauma. Based on these findings, we offer policy and practice implications in relation to lone mothers and their families. Among others are suggestions that social workers and other frontline practitioners better recognize and appreciate the achievements that might be demonstrated by 'just coping' and policy changes that support families through family break up.
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