Psychosocial antecedents of unwed motherhood among indigent adolescents

Abstract

Theoretically based hypotheses regarding psychosocial antecedents of unwed motherhood among indigent adolescents are tested. Data regarding psychosocial antecedents were obtained from a survey of a 50% sample of seventhgraders in a large urban school system. Hypotheses were tested by comparing three groups of subjects from among these respondents: (1) 82 female adolescents who received perinatal care at an adult development clinic for indigent adolescents (all gave birth out of wedlock at least one year following the baseline survey and prior to their eighteenth birthday); (2) 164 matched (by race, mother's education, and school) controls — two matches for each pre-unwed mother; and (3) 164 randomly selected controls — two controls for each preunwed mother. The results were consistent with the assertion that deviant behaviors related to and including unwed motherhood are alternative deviant responses to the subjectively recognized inability to defend against self-rejection in the course of membership group experiences in anticipation of self-enhancing consequences of the deviant behaviors. The positions in the social structure occupied by the pre-unwed mothers predispose the subjects to deviant responses by (1) increasing the probability of self-devaluing experiences and the subjective association of these experiences with the normative structure and (2) offering highly visible deviant alternatives that offer greater self-enhancing potential than the perceived low self-enhancing potential of the normative environment. The deviant patterns to which the subjects are predisposed are in fact adopted when prior social controls effictively exercised by parental and school authorities erode (as a result of the subject's identification of family and school as persistent sources of self-devaluing experiences). The specific modes of deviance adopted, including patterns associated with unwed motherhood outcomes, are apparently consistent with subculturally influenced values and adaptive/coping/defensive patterns. The total pattern of findings suggests that the same general theory of deviant behavior that has been applied to other modes of deviance is appropriate in understanding precursors of unwed motherhood among indigent adolescents.