Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Changes in the self-esteem, parental attitude, and generalized contentment among teen mothers enrolled in a parent program

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  • Adolescent pregnancy is a serious problem which creates social and emotional consequences for 1 in 10 teenaged girls and their families. Although the severity of the problem has been well documented in the literature, few empirical investigations have been conducted to expand information or to aid in the understanding of the effects of programs designed to meet the unique needs of adolescent mothers. It was the purpose of this study to examine the effects of a teen parent program on the teen mother's well-being. Specifically, the inquiry examined the self-esteem, attitudes toward the child, and generalized contentment of teenaged mothers before and after program participation. The subjects were teenaged mothers between the ages of 16 and 19 living with their biological children in an urban community of a rural county in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Volunteers for the program were assigned to a treatment group and a control group. Both groups were given the Index of Self-Esteem (ISE), the Index of Parental Attitudes (IPA), and the Generalized Contentment Scale (GCS). The treatment group then participated in a 10-week teen parent program. After the program, the 13 subjects who had completed the program and the 15 subjects in the control group were posttested on the same measures used in the pretesting. Hypotheses related to within group changes were tested with t-tests for correlated means and an analysis of covariance tested the between groups hypotheses. The Pearson product moment correlations tested for possible correlations among the three measures at pre- and posttesting. The findings of the within group analyses showed significant differences between pretest and posttest ISE (p<.05) and IPA (p<.01) scores of the subjects in the treatment group. And, although the GCS scores displayed a strong positive tendency, it did not prove to be statistically significant for the treatment group. There were no significant differences between the pretest and posttest scores on the ISE, IPA and the GCS scores of the subjects in the control group. For the between group analyses, the adjusted posttest IPA (p<.02) and GCS (p<.05) scores were found to be significantly more positive for the treatment group subjects than the control group subjects. The analysis of the ISE (p< .08) was not statistically significant. There were no significant correlations between ISE, IPA, and the GCS scores for both the treatment and control groups at pretest and posttest. the findings in this study indicate that overall there were generally significant improvements in the treatment group's self-esteem, attitude toward their child and generalized contentment after participating in a teen parent program. These results could be very encouraging to supporters of community-based programs designed to provide direct services to meet the unique needs of the adolescent mother.
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