EXPLORING THE UNEVEN EFFECTS OF ECONOMIC RECESSION AND AUSTERITY ON LONE MOTHERS: A CRITICAL REALIST INTERSECTIONAL APPROACH

Abstract

Latest studies have not only acknowledged the gendered and classed ‘nature’ of the latest economic recession and government austerity, but also their uneven impacts across the UK population. Accordingly, lone mothers have been identified as one of the groups most adversely affected. It is essential then to extend the research base on lone mothers as they already experience multiple disadvantages as a result of being the sole earner/carer of their family unit. It is also important to explore the uneven effects of these wider socioeconomic processes using an encompassing theoretical framework which grapples with how the intersections of multiple social categories can be examined simultaneously to shed light on differential outcomes.
Thus, this thesis explores lone mothers using an overarching critical realist intersectional framework to acknowledge their locations in multiple structural inequalities, and also their agential strategies when facing wider socioeconomic pressures. Using a mixed-methods design, three sub-groups of lone mothers differentiated by distinctive multiple categories of social division are identified. Based on these three sub-groups, paid employment, welfare entitlement and agential responses to recession and austerity are examined. The findings drawn by this exploration elucidate the uneven effects of the institutionalisation of neoliberalism in the economy, the labour market and the welfare state. Those differentiated effects are explained not only by experiencing lone motherhood, but also by their particular multiple intersectional positioning.
Thus, this thesis offers a valuable and original contribution to knowledge in the following three aspects: in extending the current research base on the differential impact of the economic recession and austerity on lone mothers, in intersectional theory by designing and applying an innovative critical realist intersectional framework and in mixed-methods research by employing an original longitudinal exploratory mixed-methods design.