Single-parenthood, poverty and resilience: the professional's beliefs and the possibilities of family life / Monoparentalidade, pobreza e resiliência: entre as crenças dos profissionais e as possibilidades da convivência familiar

Abstract

This article presents a comparative study on the health community agent's beliefs about the possibilities of resilience in low-income single-parent families and the coping strategies of these families in adverse situations that emerge from their life stories. The notion of resilience as applied in Psychology was taken as reference, which refers to the processes that explains how people overcome adversities. Four health agents and four single parent families were interviewed. The methodological strategies to guide the data analysis were: open interviews, life stories, reflexive interviews and grounded-theory. The results showed that the community agents hold pessimist beliefs about the poor families functioning in opposition to the elements that indicate resilience in these families' life stories. The results point to the need of transforming and adjusting the social agent's perceptions on groups who live in poverty.

Keywords

• Resilience
• low-income single-parent families
• health community agents
• beliefs on poverty