Degree Discipline

A Study of the Relationship Between Parental Attitudes and Illegitimacy (open access)

A Study of the Relationship Between Parental Attitudes and Illegitimacy

This study was concerned with the effect of parental attitudes and the illegitimacy rate among teenagers. A survey of the literature discussed many different factors affecting illegitimacy. Theorists have suggested poverty, lack of intelligence, mental abnormalities, and parental attitudes as a few of the causative factors. Also reviewed were areas such as the number of unwed mothers, their intelligence, the effect of the Negro subculture on the illegitimacy rate, the AFDC population and the illegitimate birth rate, and the background of pregnant out of wedlock mothers. The mother-daughter relationship was shown to be of importance in the likelihood of a teenage girl becoming pregnant out of wedlock. It was further suggested that dominance, ignorance, and possessiveness were important in the mother-daughter relationship. Four hypotheses proposed that there would be a significant difference between a group of mothers of teenagers with children born out of wedlock and a group of mothers whose daughters had never been pregnant. The first suggested that mothers of unwed. mothers would rate significantly higher on the possessiveness scale than mothers whose daughters have never been pregnant. The second proposed that mothers of daughters with out of wedlock children would rate significantly higher on the ignoring scale …
Date: December 1970
Creator: Nichols, Jan
System: The UNT Digital Library