Single‐Parent Family Discourse in Popular Magazines and Social Science Journals

Noting that the rise in the number of single-parent families in the United States is "one of the most dramatic social changes of the 20th century," Margaret L. Usdansky (2009) asks the question, did attitudes toward single-parent families change as well? More specifically, she wonders whether attitudes toward nonmarital childbearing and divorce (which lead to single parenthood, if only temporarily) are the same as what they were before and whether the attitudes toward each have exhibited similar or different historical patterns. Answering these questions is not as straightforward as it may seem. For besides having to clearly define and measure attitudes, there also is the difficulty of plotting changes from one period of time to the next. The Study's Data and Findings Attitudes generally are defined as mental "postures" or "dispositions" toward physical or social objects and are believed to involve "judgments" (positive, negative, or neutral) about such objects. Attitudes also are said to have, at a minimum, cognitive and emotional components (Jaccard & Blanton, 2005, pp. 126 - 127). Researchers often measure attitudes with rating scales, which are inserted into public opinion surveys. The scales have the advantage of explicitly denoting focal objects (What are your attitudes toward a specific A or B?) and typically are sophisticated enough to capture breadth (e.g., thought and emotion) and intensity (e.g., extreme like to extreme dislike). If an investigator is interested in determining whether attitudes have changed over time, he or she is likely to desire data in which the questions that were asked at "Time 1 " are identical to those asked at "Time 2" and "Time 3" and "Time 4," and so on. Considering all the above, we can readily see the challenges that Usdansky faced when she embarked on her project. Essentially, she encountered the same obstacles that every historically minded scholar encounters. Attitude surveys were not routinely conducted 75 to 100 years ago, which means there is no repository of standardized questionnaires or interviews that Usdansky could have pored over to answer the questions she raises. Whereas nonmarital childbearing and divorce over the course of the 20th century can be plotted with a fair amount of precision, public attitudes toward nonmarital childbearing and divorce cannot be. Unable to rely on surveys, Usdansky chooses, as an alternative, depictions of nonmarital childbearing and divorce in popular magazines and social science journals. Depictions are defined as "comments by a given author or commentator within the same article as a unit." Anything an author says about nonmarital childbearing or divorce, or both, also constitutes a depiction, as does anything that a commentator within an article says about nonmarital childbearing, divorce, or both (e.g., if someone cited in an article says something about the phenomena). Usdansky declares from the start, "Popular and scholarly depictions cannot tell us what the contents of a detailed series of public opinion surveys would show, were one spanning the 20th century to exist, but they capture the evolution of discourse about single-parent families in two key arenas that both influence and reflect broader public attitudes." Usdansky, in other words, acknowledges that the popular and scholarly depictions are not analogous to, but are, at best, related to public attitudes. Even with introducing this caveat, Usdansky wants to be able to talk about what is being thought and felt in the community at large. Thus, on one hand, she specifically states that she is studying a small group of elites, whose attitudes are represented in the depictions that happen to be in print, and, on the other hand, she views the depictions as a reflection of the opinions of Americans in general. Usdansky should not be faulted for trying to associate published depictions and public attitudes. Social scientists have long studied media messages in order to get an inkling of the mental dispositions of the people to whom the messages are addressed. …