Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 Assistant Professor. Attar Institute of Higher Education. Mashhad. Iran
2 Master of art. Department of art, University of Tarbiat modares Tehran.Iran
3 Department of Counseling, Faculty of Psychology, University of Hekmat Razavi, Mashhad. Iran.
Abstract
Introduction: Today, the number of female heads of households is increasing all over the world, including Iran, and everyone agrees that they are a vulnerable group that needs to be supported. Support that is often provided by family, friends, and governmental and quasi-governmental institutions. But it seems that more important than these supports is the perception of the female heads of the household about these supports. This study was designed with the aim of investigating the perception of these women about social support.
Method: In this research, which was conducted using the phenomenological method, 21 participants were selected in the fall of 1400 from among the women heads of households in Mashhad city using a targeted method and maximum distribution until theoretical saturation was reached. Then the participants told their stories about these supports during a semi-structured interview. After the completion of the interview phase, all the narratives were carefully implemented and coded to provide the necessary background for comparison, classification and recognition of differences. Again, the extracted classes were examined to see if they have sufficient descriptive power and implications for the data. The process of modification and revision continued until it seemed that the modified classes were compatible with the interview data. Then the above classes were examined with the aim of drawing the result space.
Findings: The findings show that basically, women heads of households are supported by three sources, which are family, friends, and governmental and semi-governmental institutions; who provide these supports in the form of emotional, instrumental, informational and financial support based on the proximity to the recipient.
The family offers them emotional and economic support, but opposes their presence in the public arena. Friends offer a wider range of support to these women, which include emotional, advisory, economic, occupational and spiritual support. Also, government departments and non-governmental organizations, in addition to economic aid, help to develop their professional skills by holding empowerment courses. This is while the economic assistance of these institutions, if it is not consistent with the perspective of poverty alleviation, provides reproduction of poverty and debt crisis for many of these women. The interviewees believed that the support of strangers would put them under suspicion, so they avoided being close to any source of support that might harm them. Also, mistrust, instability and poisoning of the atmosphere have cast a shadow on the lives of the majority of them. The majority of female heads of households, in order to receive emotional support, their priority was to go to family and friends, and some of them turn to official institutions to receive economic support. However, the cultural consequences of widowhood, divorce, or celibacy cause most of their interactions to be with women; And almost all of them do not trust men and in most cases they want temporary presence and "living apart" just to meet their needs. Therefore, the mistrust, instability, and poisonous nature of the relationships, especially the relationship with the opposite sex, cast a shadow in their request for support from all three sources of family, friends, and government institutions, and provide the basis for the appearance of contradictory perceptions of these supports.
The two main axes of "trying to distance" and "rethinking relationships" cover their perception of receiving support. Due to lack of trust, some try to distance themselves from others and minimize their level of communication in this plagued atmosphere; And some others have created a kind of rethinking in receiving social support, ignoring the look and judgment of the people around them and looking to meet their needs. On the other hand, now the majority of female heads of households have transferred their links to groups in cyberspace; But the concerns of the real world are still there for them, with the difference that the virtual space has increased their power of bargaining and choice. At the beginning of the loss of a spouse, widows mostly need emotional support, and as the mourning period passes, they show their financial, instrumental and informational needs. Divorced women also need more emotional support at the beginning of separation and then other support; this is while single women prioritize financial, instrumental, informational and finally emotional independence respectively.
The results showed that the society defines a new identity for the women who have become the head of the household, and therefore they define their relations with the society in a special framework that they mostly do not benefit from. The feeling of rejection and isolation, pity, alienation, insecurity and discomfort are among these consequences. In such an environment, these women try to use various solutions such as hiding their guardianship, returning to their paternal family and defining new relationships, distorting social relations and restoring their identity and overcoming the anxiety and psychological disturbance caused by guardianship. . Such a lived experience, on the one hand, isolates and rejects them from within their group, but on the other hand, it forces them to expand the radius of their social relations to secure a living and establish new relationships with outside their group.
Discussion:
Naturally, social class is a determining factor in obtaining the opportunities and facilities that people have and can be the source of different inequalities (Torabi et al., 2016), therefore being in a social class is an inevitable part of people's identity and therefore to a The meaning of social class penetrates deep into the psychological system and forms a part of how one feels about oneself and others. It seems that ever since the theories and literature related to women heads of the household have been formed, it has been happening that the examination of their perception in their social class and the feelings that come along with it has been an omitted element. Is. However, examining individuals in social class is important because it is a source of inequality. In this direction and in the context of time, family, friends and governments have tried to promote women heads of households who are in lower classes to higher classes with their support. Many of these studies show that basically the dissolution of the marital relationship is a stressful stage in the life of every female head of the household (Bastos, 2009). Because when a woman takes charge of the family, she has to draw a new identity for herself and start "redefining the relationship with the world outside herself" and adapting to the new situation. Going towards his family, friends and official and unofficial institutions and redefining the people he used to hang out with are among his new relationships. According to Kaufman (2015), even now social relations are expanding towards an unreal world; therefore, some of these women turn to activities in cyberspace, a space that is full of structural contradictions for them, just like the real world. The narrative of women heads of households about social support showed that women heads of households tend to be supported by family and friends. This result confirms the idea of Habermas who says: Basically, a distinction should be made between the rationality of the social system (official body) and the rationality of the life world (informal groups).
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