Towards a “new way of thinking” about African American family life in urban neighborhoods

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Persistent link to this item

Statistics
View Statistics

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Title

Towards a “new way of thinking” about African American family life in urban neighborhoods

Published Date

2013-01

Publisher

Type

Thesis or Dissertation

Abstract

After years of scholarly debate, both our arguments and counterarguments regarding African American family life in urban communities continue to be driven by ideological positions rather than concrete reality. More emphasis has been placed on broader sociocultural issues and deleterious outcomes than on the everyday lived experience. Thus, the high level characterizations offered by scholars and the concrete realities of families have often appeared disconnected. To advance our understanding of the African American family living in urban America, we must deal with this conceptual disconnect. This hermeneutic phenomenological study explored the nature of the family-community relationship as a means to understand the lived experience of "home" within this context. It treated the narratives of 11 high school students as another school of thought regarding the phenomenon. These narratives explicitly and implicitly captured the family-community relationship within this context via storytelling, interviews and participant observation. Two critical insights emerged from this interpretive process. The first was the public nature of family within the urban African American context. Here the family-community relationship came to be understood through the notion of intersections versus the historical notion of boundaries. The second was the public nature of the urban African American family and the implications of this essence for how families understand themselves and their relationship with the broader society. In each of these cases, the assumption of the public-private dichotomy in family theory was brought into question. New metaphors for understanding family life in this context are considered and future theoretical, research, practice and policy streams are explored.

Description

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation.January 2013. Major: Family Social Science. Advisor: Paul Rosenblatt, PhD. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 153 pages.

Related to

Replaces

License

Collections

Series/Report Number

Funding information

Isbn identifier

Doi identifier

Previously Published Citation

Other identifiers

Suggested citation

Collins Sims, Cherie M.. (2013). Towards a “new way of thinking” about African American family life in urban neighborhoods. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/144458.

Content distributed via the University Digital Conservancy may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor. By using these files, users agree to the Terms of Use. Materials in the UDC may contain content that is disturbing and/or harmful. For more information, please see our statement on harmful content in digital repositories.