A Qualitative Exploration of Why Faith Matters in African American Marriages and Families
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Researchers have found recurring connections between shared marital religious involvement and improved marital stability functioning. However, researchers know little about the processes at work behind this connection. More specifically, there is a lack of data that addresses these issues in African American families, even though Black families tend to be involved in and influenced by religion. To address this paucity, in-depth, qualitative interviews were conducted with 60 married, African-American parents to explore the reported influence of faith in their personal, marital, and family lives. Using qualitative coding and analysis, researchers identified recurring concepts and key themes. In this chapter, six key themes relating to the interface between spiritual beliefs and Black families are presented. Those themes are: 1) “It’s more than a religion, it’s a relationship”; 2) “It’s not a sacrifice…It’s good stewardship”; 3) “Faith gets you through the rough times”; 4) “All things work together for good to them that love God”; 5) “Our last breath on earth is our first breath with Him”; and 6) “God ordained marriage and family.” Rich qualitative data from the interviews that illustrate why these spiritual/religious beliefs are seen as valuable and meaningful are presented. Implications for practice and research are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".