African Single Mothers’ Experiences of Work and Career in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The work and career experiences of African, single mothers from low socio-economic backgrounds have been ignored in previous research: the literature has largely focused on the family and work balance experiences of middle class women. The current study investigated the family and work balance experiences of a mixed group of emerging middle class and poor African women employed as semi/professionals or as labourers. A qualitative research design was employed. Nine participants, ranging in age from 26 to 52 years, were interviewed. Data were analysed by means of the voice-centred, relational method. Most participants held an instrumentalist view of work and career as an opportunity to earn a living to support themselves and their families. This finding was more prevalent amongst the single mothers employed as labourers. Participants also saw work and career as an opportunity to rise out of poverty and contribute to their society. The view that work was intrinsically satisfying was rare and circumscribed to only a few in the semi/professional group. The absence of a father figure in the participants’ lives had economic and social consequences for their families; both groups struggled to balance work and family life. The findings call for educational and work programmes centred around an emancipatory, social justice orientation to enable single mothers to participate meaningfully in social life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".