Other Great Books
by Dr. Dwayne L. Buckingham
Qualified, yet Single:
Why Good Men Remain Single
Unconditional Love:
What Every Woman and Man Desires in a Relationship
A Black Man’s Worth:
Conqueror and Head of Household
A Black Woman’s Worth: My Queen and Backbone
Ground-Breaking Films
by Dr. Dwayne L. Buckingham
A Black Man’s Worth:
Conqueror and Head of Household
A Black Woman’s Worth:
My Queen and Backbone
Qualified, yet Single:
Why Good Men Remain Single
www.realhorizonsdlb.com
Can Black Women Achieve Marital Satisfaction?
Copyright © 2012 by Dr. Dwayne L. Buckingham
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
Additional copies of this book can be purchased online at www.realhorizonsdlb.com or by contacting:
R.E.A.L. Horizons Consulting Service, LLC
P.O. Box 2665
Silver Spring, MD 20915
240-242-4087 Voice mail
Expanding Horizons by keeping it “R.E.A.L.”
FIRST EDITION
Cover designed by Stephen Fortune
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011962626
Genre/Self-Help
ISBN: 978-0-9849423-3-6
ISBN: 9780984942398
Printed in the United States of America
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to my beloved deceased mother, Arlene “Tot” Pettis, who instilled in me a sense of purpose, eagerness for academic advancement, and the motivation to improve my personal life beyond my wildest dreams. Rest in peace and know that your hard work, selfless attitude, and sacrifices were not in vain.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge and thank the seven women for sharing their heart-felt stories about their childhood and adult experiences. Without the sharing of your heart-felt childhood and adult experiences this book would not exist. I am forever grateful and appreciative of your time, energy, willingness, and commitment to bringing my research to life. Your diverse, rich, and heartfelt perspectives and experiences will provide the world with an in-depth and personal view of how childhood experiences can influence adults’ ability to achieve marital satisfaction. I thank you wholeheartedly for sharing your stories and lives.
Secondly, I would like to acknowledge and thank Dr. Ruth Bundy, Dr. Laurel Gulish Beckham and Dr. Ayn Embar-Seddon O’Reilly for your commitment, guidance, and unwavering support throughout the research process.
Third, I would like to thank Ayize and Aiyana Ma’at, the founders of B Intentional, LLC. I truly appreciate the support you all provided by allowing me to use your organization as my research site. Thanks for giving back to the community.
Last, but not least, I would like to acknowledge and thank all of my family, friends and colleagues who provided encouragement, moral support, unconditional love, and true understanding during my research journey.
CONTENTS
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
The Connection: Childhood Experience and Marital Satisfaction
CHAPTER TWO
Understanding Black Women’s Behavior
CHAPTER THREE
The Method: Phenomenological Research
CHAPTER FOUR
Georgia’s Personal Story
CHAPTER FIVE
Angie’s Personal Story
CHAPTER SIX
Mona’s Personal Story
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sabrina’s Personal Story
CHAPTER EIGHT
Kim’s Personal Story
CHAPTER NINE
Shelia’s Personal Story
CHAPTER TEN
Marsha’s Personal Story
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Unique Stories, but Similar Experiences
CHAPTER TWELVE
Empowering Black Women
Bibliography
Glossary of Terms
Notes
Can Black Women
Achieve Marital Satisfaction?
Introduction
All women, including Black women, should be afforded the opportunity to achieve marital satisfaction if desired, regardless of the nature of their childhood experiences. However, decades of research have shown that childhood experiences can affect children throughout their childhoods, extending into their adulthoods. Families have a profound impact on children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development.1 Children are initiated into cultural practice through the parent-child relationship. How children view themselves and their capabilities are grounded in the parent-child relationship, and parents clearly teaches critical attitudes and practices that serve to reproduce a habitual referential stance for the child’s emerging mind.
Children typically display the behavior of the same-gender parent by the time they are 5 or 6-years-old and use gender to select behaviors to use in their own social relationships.2 It is reasonable to except that little girls are more likely to model behavior similar to that of their mothers and little boys are more likely to mode behavior that is similar to that of their fathers.3 Exploring and understanding the parent-child relationship is very important in explaining and understanding adult behavior because behaviors parents engage in serve as models for children4 and children’s well-being is associated with parental style.5 The parent-child relationship can serve as a significant predictor of personal happiness in adulthood.6
The purpose of this book is to provide you with insight about ground-breaking research that explored how Black women’s childhood experiences impacted their perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction. Previous research about the marital quality of life or satisfaction for Black women tends to focus primarily on socioeconomic and social interactions, but no studies have been conducted that explore Black women’s childhood experiences and how these experiences impact perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction.7 This book takes a look into the lives of seven Black women who shared their heart-felt childhood and adult experiences as married women. It provides descriptive details about how childhood experiences and socio-structural factors work together to influence Black women’s development and behavior.
Given the high rates of singlehood, single parenting and marital dissatisfaction among Black women, efforts to gain deeper understanding of the parent-child relationship must be discussed and explored extensively. As Black women, your desire to achieve marital satisfaction should not be inhibited by childhood experiences that may have potentially extended into your adulthood.
Marriage is the most common and healthiest living arrangement for raising children. However over the past century the family system has undergone significant changes and divorce rates are at an all time high. This negative shift in living arrangements has increased the chances of children, especially poor and minority children, growing up in single-parent families, exposing them to familial instability, thus decreasing their ability to enter into marital relationships and/or achieve marital satisfaction in adulthood.8
Early works on child development reported that childhood nurturing experiences play an instrumental role in shaping and influencing the perceptions and behavior of adults.9 Perceptions and behaviors regarding one’s ability to complete a task begin in childhood and is learned through a variety of methods that include observational learning or vicarious experiences.10 Many of the childhood experiences that adults experienced as children often serve as cognitive and social guideposts for them as they transition into adulthood. With this in mind, one could assume that childhood experiences can potentially impact Black women’s perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction.
Most people would agree that parents play vital roles in the development of their children’s perceptions and confidence levels in achieving tasks. Childhood experiences provide the foundation for human motivation, well-being, and personal accomplishment.11
Highlighting the essence of Black women’s childhood experiences is essential to understanding and empowering this vulnerable group. Well-intended research about marital quality of life for Black women tends to focus primarily on socioeconomic and social interactions. It is not unusual for Black women’s experiences, needs, or realities to be minimized, disregarded, or linked to other Black people and White women.12 A lack of understanding about how Black women view the possibility of achieving marital satisfaction inhibit healthcare professionals from offering culturally sensitive treatment that can potentially empower Black women and assist them in their quest to achieve marital satisfaction.
I decided to conduct this study because I had a strong desire to explore and understand how Black women’s childhood experiences impact their perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction. The decline of marriage as a social institution has negatively affected all women, but has been more pronounced among Black women than White women. The percentage of never-married Black women doubled from 20.7 % to 42.4% between 1950 and 200013 and according to recent marital statistics, appropriately two-thirds of Black women will never marry.14
While there is a wealth of research that highlights how childhood experiences and cognitive development can impact adult perceptions, behavior, and health,15 no research has been conducted that explored Black women’s childhood experiences and how these experiences impact perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction. Although 69% of all Black children are born outside of marriage,16 the topic of how Black women perceive their childhood experience and perceptions of marital satisfaction have been poorly researched.17 This study partially filled this void, and I assumed that the findings would encourage mental health practitioners to conduct culturally sensitive assessments that explore Black women’s childhood experiences in order to develop interventions to better equip them to achieve marital satisfaction, despite their childhood experiences.
As a practicing psychotherapist, I have come to believe that the purpose of therapy is to help clients understand the meaning associated with, or resulting from, their current or past experiences, so that clients can be proactive in modifying future intentional acts.18 This means that therapists are responsible for helping clients become conscious of meanings assigned to experiences, so that clients can strive to change their own life. With this in mind, therapists should explore the upbringing of adults to better understand their temperament and ability to perform in the future. Encouraging Black women to engage in in-depth and detailed dialogue about their childhood experiences and how these experiences impact perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction during the therapeutic process can prove to be beneficial to them. During the self-reflective process, therapists can help clients understand that specific emotions that are expressed in adulthood can potentially be linked to specific childhood experiences or observations.19
Research regarding marital satisfaction among Black women has primarily focused on socioeconomic factors such as the growth in women’s economic independence.20 The rationale for conducting this study was to explore and understand how Black women’s childhood experienced impact their perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction. By exploring Black women’s childhood experiences and how these experiences impact perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction, healthcare providers and researchers can gain valuable knowledge about dynamic parent–child nurturing experiences among Black women and how these experiences impact perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction.
Childhood experiences, especially observations of how expressive parents are toward each other, can play a role in fostering childhood capability perceptions and behaviors that extend into adulthood.21 Childhood experiences play an essential role in influencing perceptions and behaviors that can manifest in adulthood.22 Therefore, the findings from this study could enhance mental health practitioners’ ability to uncover the essence of the childhood experiences of Black women and how these experiences impact perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction. As a result of acquiring additional information about the phenomena, mental health practitioners can help Black women gain insight into their emotional, cognitive, social, and behavioral difficulties, which in turn can lead to the development of interventions that will improve their ability to succeed in marriage and other life endeavors.
The central research question I used in the study was presented as a broad question in order to prevent limitations surrounding the goal of the study. In addition, I used sub-questions to obtain information about Black women’s perspectives regarding their childhood experiences and perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction.
The central research question was:
1. How do Black women who seek marital education perceive their childhood nurturing experiences and how do these experiences impact perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction?
Subquestions included:
• How do Black women’s childhood nurturing experiences influence their perceptions of marital satisfaction?
• How do Black women’s cultural backgrounds influence their perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction?
Human functioning is viewed as the product of a dynamic interplay between personal, behavioral, and environmental influences23 and understanding the cause and effect of human functioning drives most research. However, no research has been conducted to explore Black women’s childhood experiences and how these experiences impact perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction.
Because of the vital role of parental influence on children’s cognitive and social developmental during childhood and throughout the lifespan, the assessment of Black women’s childhood experiences and perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction must be explored to identify and help those who are at risk of exhibiting low perceptions of their ability to achieve marital satisfaction and/or of experiencing divorce. Rates of marital disruption and separation or divorce are significantly higher for Black women, at 47% when compared to 32% and 34% of all first marriages for White and Hispanic women.24 Furthermore, Black women are often viewed as a minority hidden between White females and Black males and as a result their subjective experiences are not widely understood or studied.25
This study brought forth Black women’s childhood experiences and perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction from their own perspectives, and therefore challenged normative assumptions about the phenomenon. In phenomenological research, understanding of phenomena or reality is obtained through detailed and in-depth narrative descriptions of participants’ experiences and feelings.26 A phenomenological approach was best suited for this study because I hoped to gain a better understanding of how Black women’s childhood experiences impacted their perceptions of achieving martial satisfaction.
Undering and making sense of human behavior is a very complex process. Over the past several decades several theories have evolved that attempt to explain why women behave the way they do. While there are numerous theories that I could have chosen to gain a better understanding of Black women’s behavior, I selected Social-Cognitive Theory and Critical Theory as theoretical frameworks for this study because both theories seek to understand and describe human behavior and development from an interpretive stance.27 Both theoretical frameworks explain human behavior and development by examining ways in which social phenomena develop while also offering explanations regarding the interplay of environmental and social factors in the development of individuals’ behavior as well as their cognitive and emotional processes.28
The use of Social-Cognitive Theory was necessary in this study because it focuses on the role of observational learning and social experience in development of behavioral and cognitive processing patterns. Also, Social-Cognitive Theory explores human development from multiple perspectives, including a thorough explanation of psychological development and functioning.29 With this in mind, I used Social-Cognitive Theory to understand the detailed descriptions of Black women’s childhood experience and how these experiences impact perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction. Because of the vital role of parental influence on children’s cognitive and social developmental during childhood and throughout the lifespan, the assessment of Black women’s childhood experiences and perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction must be explored to identify and help Black women achieve increased levels of marital satisfaction.
Although Social-Cognitive Theory provides information about the interplay of personal, behavioral, and environmental influences on human behavior and development, it differs from Critical Theory, which highlights the importance of examining and critiquing society and culture in attempts to understand human behavior and development. Habermas, one of the leading scholars among critical theorists, believed in empowering human beings by removal of constraints associated with gender, class, and race.30 The use of Critical Theory was essential in this study because I was interested in empowering Black women by educating and collaborating with them. According to recent research estimates about marital disruption, 32% and 34% of all first marriages involving White and Hispanic women, end in separation or divorce within the first 10 years, but the figure is substantially higher for Black women, at 47% of all marriages.31 Given this, Critical Theory was used in this study to highlight and describe cultural and racial bias that affects Black women and the phenomena under investigation.
Given my intent to gain a better understanding of Black women’s childhood experiences from their personal perspectives while also exploring social/cultural influences, the use of the two abovementioned theoretical frameworks was essential. Although the two theories are somewhat distinct, they both offer explanations about human behavior, examining personal and sociocultural factors. To this end, the use of both theories was imperative to gaining an understanding of Black women’s childhood experiences and how these experiences impact perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction.
Social-Cognitive Theory encompasses the following major assumptions: (a) people can learn through observation or modeling, (b) cognitions influence learning, and (c) learning does not necessarily lead to change in behavior. Although Social-Cognitive Theory is composed of three basic assumptions, my primary objectives were to better understand how Black women learn through observation or modeling and acquire descriptive information about their childhood experiences and how these experiences impact perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction. According to Bandura’s Social-Cognitive Theory, childhood experience and personality development can be shaped by observational learning and social experience.32
Social-Cognitive Theory explains how people acquire and maintain certain behavioral patterns, and emphasizes that cognition strongly influences people’s capability to construct reality, self-regulate, encode information, and perform behaviors.33 In contrast to behaviorist theories, Social-Cognitive Theory addresses human functioning by emphasizing that inner processes are as equally influential as environmental factors. Human functioning with all of its complexities cannot be explained or understood without examination of one’s own conscious mind, because sense making begins with one’s own psychological processes.34 Therefore, it is too difficult to determine how an individual will cope with environmental challenges or outcomes without evaluating and understanding his or her cognitive process, which influences how environmental outcomes are interpreted.35
To gain a better understanding of the phenomena under investigation from a social-cognitive-theory perspective, theoretical constructs such as reciprocal determinism, symbolizing capability, and vicarious capability listed below will be examined to illustrate the linkage between Black women’s childhood experiences and perceptions of achieving marital satisfaction.
Social-cognitive theorists put forward that individuals’ socioeconomic status, educational background, and family structure do not directly affect their behavior, because individuals’ aspirations, self-efficacy beliefs, personal standards, emotional states, and other self-control influences have more of an impact on behavior.36 From this basic argument, Bandura’s37 conception of reciprocal determinism evolved. Reciprocal determinism emphasizes that interactions that result in a triadic reciprocity are created based on personal (cognition, affect, biological events, etc.), behavioral, and environmental influences that work together.38 Behavior, cognition, and other environmental and personal factors influence each other bidirectionally,39 as reflected in Figure 1. Furthermore, each source of influence may have different affects on other sources at different times. Also, some sources of influence may be stronger than others, depending on individual, behavioral, and situational factors.40 Reciprocal influences are activated over time and may not occur simultaneously. Therefore, it is important to note that causal factors often trigger a reciprocal interaction.
Figure 1. The reciprocal relationships between behavior, external events, and internal factors. From Self-efficacy: The Exercise of Control, by A. Bandura, 1997, New York, NY: W. H. Freeman.
Human development occurs as result of the interface or interaction of the different influences.41 Bandura’s reciprocal determinism sheds light on the dynamic bidirectional interaction between individual behavior and environmental influence. Individuals change their behavior to adapt to their environment, and environmental changes contribute to behavioral change in individuals.42 For example, imagine that a soldier does not wish to remain in the military anymore, but due to a contractual agreement the soldier is not capable of separating. As a result of feeling trapped the soldier reports increased job dissatisfaction and the soldier’s attitude and performance declines. In return, the soldier begins to act out toward colleagues and superiors, which results in the development of ill feelings and tension for all parties. Therefore, both social environment and physical behavior will generate increased tension and cause further acting out. In this example, behavior and social environmental factors influence each other, but the individual could change the course of the aforementioned factors by changing the way the person thinks about the employment situation. Changing the way the soldier thinks is linked to personal or internal factors that also influence behavior and social factors. In sum, reciprocal determinism acknowledges that change can occur in an individual, but environmental factors can significantly influence behavior and internal processing.
434445