Stigma and Teenage Mothers

By Kyla Ellis-Sloan

 

Teenage pregnancy and parenthood are often cited as causes of a number of social problems in the UK. For example, it is pointed out that teenage pregnancy carries health risks for mother and baby and that teenage parenting leads to poverty and low educational outcomes. Consequently, teenage parenthood (and particularly motherhood) is considered to be a significant concern for policy makers in the UK. The previous Labour government responded to these concerns by implementing the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy. This aimed to reduce the incidence of teenage pregnancy and to support those who became teenage parents. In 2011 Sarah Teather (then Minister for Children and Families under the current government) stated that the prevention of teenage pregnancy remained a priority for the coalition but policies would be now implemented through an integrated localised approach rather than a centrally led and funded strategy.

Interestingly, these concerns and policy responses have emerged despite considerable debate as to the causes and consequences of teenage pregnancy. For instance, educational failure and poverty are argued to be causes rather than consequences of teenage pregnancy (see for example Arai 2009 and Duncan et al 2010). Furthermore, academics point out the significance of socio-economic status on poor outcomes. In other words, teenage pregnancy and parenthood is not inevitably nor inherently detrimental to mother and child. Nonetheless this body of work remains overshadowed by the negative associations noted above. Furthermore, dominant representations of teenage parenthood position the teenage mother herself as a social problem. This stems from long held and oft repeated assumptions that becoming a teenage mother brings with it an entitlement to housing and welfare benefits. Pregnancy is therefore often seen as a choice motivated by greed, immorality or laziness. It should then be of little surprise that there is a stigma attached to teenage motherhood.

Experiences of stigma became particularly apparent during an ethnographic study with young mothers. The research was conducted over a year at three separate teenage parent support groups and examined decisions made by young women as they become teenage mothers. In-depth interviews and observations at support group meetings were used to uncover motives, influences and constraints on key decisions such as those around contraception use. The research also focused on young mother’s interactions with support services and so considered decisions relating to education and employment following childbirth. These methods also, however, elicited reports of negative assumptions, hurtful judgements and sometimes ill treatment based on the women’s age and linked to the stigma attached to youthful parenting.

Drawing on Erving Goffman’s work (1963), stigma is defined here as being a characteristic or trait which brings an individual into disrepute. Stigma is applied to people who don’t meet the norms and values of society or who are believed to have behaved inappropriately. So, a pregnancy marks a teenager out as being ‘prematurely’ sexually active. The continuation of that pregnancy, when considered in conjunction with negative understandings of teenage pregnancy, marks teenage mothers out as being wantonly ignorant or even immoral. This article demonstrates that young mothers are keenly aware of the way in which teenage pregnancy and parenthood are publically perceived. The young mothers discussed in this article try to avoid this stigma by presenting their lives and decisions in ways which challenge dominant assumptions. For instance, they emphasise how they were not at fault for their pregnancies but have nonetheless taken responsibility and become good mothers.

The impact of stigma on teenage mothers and their families is an important field of study.  In a recent article, The Daily Mail drew on data from the Office of National Statistics to highlight stigma as a potential factor in the reported decline of teenage pregnancy (Chorley and Doughty 2014). Whilst it is possible that this is a contributing factor, we do not know whether stigma has been at the heart of declines which have been evident for some time. Moreover, I would urge caution in welcoming this outcome of the stigmatising of teenage motherhood. We know that in previous decades, shame attached to unplanned or unwanted pregnancy (for instance in the case of illegitimacy) often led women to extreme and horrific decisions about their own and their babies lives. I am not suggesting that this is likely to reoccur, not least because of the advent of contraception and abortion, but we do need to consider the implications for women driven to abortion through shame. Furthermore, we also know that stigma has important consequences for women who do become young mothers. For instance, we know that good quality ante-natal care is important to the well-being of both mother and baby. Where this has been accessed, many health risks associated with teenage pregnancy are reduced if not eliminated (Macintyre and Cunningham-Burley 1993; Irvine et al 1997; Botting et al 1998; Kaufman 1999). Yet stigma can deter young mothers from accessing support services during and after pregnancy. This brings into question whether stigma, rather than being a teenage mother per se, is at the heart of some of the poor health outcomes of teenage pregnancy. Stigma should not, therefore, be applauded as a way to reduce teenage pregnancy and parenthood. Indeed, this article recommends that greater efforts need to be made to challenge misconceptions surrounding young motherhood and thus reduce stigma.


This piece is based on the article by Kyla Ellis-Sloan published in the February 2014 issue of Sociological Research Online: Teenage Mothers, Stigma and their 'Presentation of Self'.

References 

ARAI, L. (2009) Teenage Pregnancy: The making and unmaking of a problem. Bristol, Policy Press.

BOTTING, B., M. Rosato, et al. (1998) Teenage Mothers and the Health of Their Children,  Population Trends 93: 19-28.

CHORLEY, M and S, Doughty. (2014) Dramatic fall inteen pregnancies to a record low after number of young mothers falls by 10% ina year MailOnline

DUNCAN, S., R. Edwards, et al. (2010) What's the Problem with Teenage Parents? In: S. Duncan, R. Edwards and C. Alexander (eds) Teenage Parenthood: What's the problem? London, The Tufnell Press.

GOFFMAN, E. (1963) Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity Harmondsworth: Penguin.

IRVINE, H., T. Bradley, et al. (1997) The Implications of Teenage Pregnancy and Motherhood for Primary Health Care: Unresolved issues, British Journal of General Practice 47: 323-326.

KAUFMAN, M. (1999) Day-to-Day Ethical Issues in the Care of Young Parents and Their Children in: J. Wong and D. Checkland (eds) Teen Pregnancy and Parenting: Social Ethical Issues. Toronto, University of Toronto Press.

MACINTYRE, S. and S. Cunningham-Burley (1993). Teenage Pregnancy as a Social Problem: A view from the United Kingdom, in: D. Rhode and A. Lawson (eds) The Politics of Pregnancy: Adolescent Sexuality and Public Policy. New Haven, Yale University Press.

Attitudes: Ontology, Methodology, Impact

By Mark Elliot

In the special section on attitudes, published in the February 2014 issue of Sociological Research Online, we offer some reflections on the attitude and its role within the social sciences and sociology in particular. Our central point is that the concept is pervasive in social science, and yet for a disciplinary environment where reflective criticism is the norm and where constructs are constantly questioned, the attitude has had a remarkably easy ride. Part of the issue here is that the attitude was largely developed within psychology and in a sense that discipline has done its work. It is time that the concept was subjected to sociological scrutiny: for sociology to claim it, critique it, develop it.

The attitude as a social construct emerged out of mentalistic psychology in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Spencer (1862) was amongst the first to use the term in his work First Principles where he refers to “attitude of mind”. An early distinction, probably attributable to the sociologist Ellsworth Faris (1925), was between the perceptual and behavioural conceptualisations (or perhaps aspects) of the attitude. Although most scholars did not see this distinction as functional, it was an early pointer to an ontological and methodological issue that still remains: the apparent disjunction between attitudes (as we measure them) and behaviour (as we observe it). Notwithstanding this conundrum, it is fair to summarise this early theorising as the view of the attitude as an encapsulation of the intentional relationship between a (human) agent and its environment.

The blossoming of cognitive social psychology between the 1940s and the 1970s, brought the attitude to the forefront of psychology as a social science. In parallel with this manifestation was the explosion of the social survey as mechanism for social measurement. Early surveys did not focus greatly on attitudes. Indeed, Roger Jowell, in his introduction to the first British Social Attitudes survey (carried out in 1983) remarked “Public attitudes are as much a part of social reality as are behaviour patterns, social conditions or demographic characteristics, but their measurement has never been accorded the same priority” (Jowell and Airey 1984). Thirty years on, many modern day social surveys do include a significant tranche of questions canvassing the respondent’s attitudes.

During the 1980s an intellectual shift began within psychology. It had always sat between the sciences and humanities, but around this time its relationship with the sciences, most notably neurology and computer science, strengthened markedly. Consequently, the pure social psychological scholarship which had driven much of the early work on attitudes became less prevalent and for the past thirty years we have seen a large scale increase in the application of the concept of the attitude within the social sciences with very little work on the corresponding theory and methodology. So we (the social sciences outside of psychology) are in an uncomfortable position. We are using a construct - the attitude - which we have essentially imported from psychology, arguably somewhat uncritically. Given the raging debates that can often occur within our disciplines around key theoretical and methodological constructs, this is an odd state of affairs indeed.

Hence, the major driver for us in producing this special section is our view that sociology should now claim this construct as its own. We should develop theory as to its ontological status and the methodology with which to capture and analyse it, and assess the impact that it has (at both micro and macro levels).  The central scholarly enquiry here is: what is the role of the attitude in social science?  This enquiry has numerous more specific spin-offs: How important is the attitude for policy and decision making? How central is it to the social science collective and to our individual disciplines and fields?  What type of entity is it? Is an attitude an expression of agency or merely a third party description of (self)-observed consistencies?

One might observe that these types of enquiry are inherently sociological and perhaps the flip side of this is that many sociological enquiries are inherently attitudinal. Core fields of sociological enquiry - stratification, gender, social class, social movements and culture - all seem to contain attitudinal elements. Several of the papers in the special section consider this relationship explicitly. Voas calls for a more sociological perspective on attitudes, moving beyond “the individual likes and dislikes described by psychologists”. Watt and Elliot tackle this relationship from the other direction, speculating on the notion that social theories might be representable as attitudinal types.

A key discussion in the attitudes literature is the relationship between attitudes and other constructs.  Several of the papers reflect on this issue. Voas tries to make clear the distinction between attitudes and other social psychological constructs (values, beliefs, feelings and behaviour). Watt and Elliot make an essentially methodological case for disconnecting the attitude from actual behaviour, preferring the term imagined behaviour. Kulnin and Seymer provide evidence on how what is articulated by the political elite moderates the relationship between values and attitudes. Paterson views social attitudes as mediating constructs between education and social participation.

Methodologically, all of the papers use, at least in part, social survey data. However for Chattoe-Brown these data are simply a way of improving the performance of agent based models of attitude dynamics, whilst for Devine and Robinson as well as Voas they are primarily the objects of study rather than analytical media.

To conclude, the attitude has de facto a long history within the social sciences, but as Voas states in his article “The sociology of attitudes is both well established and surprisingly underdeveloped.” This state of affairs seems undesirable both for the study of attitudes and for the social science disciplines that engage with the concept. The articles here provide a selection of perspectives on how a new social science of attitudes might be taken forward.

References
FARIS, E. (1925) ‘The Concept of Social Attitudes’ Journal of Applied Sociology, 9 p. 404-409.
JOWELL, R.  and AIREY, C. (Eds) (1984). British Social Attitudes: the 1984 Report. Gower: Aldershot.
SPENCER (1862) First Principles Appleton cited in Allport (1954)