The value of the α spectroscopic factor ( S α ) of the 6.356 MeV 1/2 + state of 17O is believed to have significant astrophysical implications due to the importance of the 13C( α, n) 16O reaction as a possible source of neutron production for the s process. To further study this effect, an accurate measurement of the 13C( 6Li, d) 17O reaction at E lab=60 MeV has been performed recently by Kubono et al., who found a new value for the spectroscopic factor of the 6.356 MeV 1/2 + state of 17O based on a distorted wave Born approximation (DWBA) analysis of these data. This new value, S α ≈0.011, is surprisingly much smaller than those used previously in astrophysical calculations ( S α ≈0.3–0.7) and thus poses a serious question as to the role of the 13C( α, n) 16O reaction as a source of neutron production. In this work we perform a detailed analysis of the same 13C( 6Li, d) 17O data within the DWBA as well as the coupled reaction channel (CRC) formalism. Our analysis yields an S α value of over an order of magnitude larger than that of Kubono et al., for the 6.356 MeV 1/2 + state of 17O.