Andrea G. Hunter

The major aims of my research are to explore the linkages between the life course, families, and social structure, and to broaden research on African Americans, especially families. I have sought to meet these aims by (a) asking fundamental questions about the family and the interconnected lives of its members, and (b) reframing old questions and expanding interpretations of aspects of black family life, past and present, that have defined the field of black family studies. Specifically, my research focuses on (a) variations in the context, structure, and social organization of families and social networks, and their impact on the roles, behavior, and well-being of family members across the life span; (b) constructions of gender and the ways in which gender affects family roles and life course trajectories; and (c) family history, the intersection of the life course and social change, and the social, economic, and cultural transformations affecting African American families over the last century. My approach is interdisciplinary, I draw primarily on life course theory and feminist perspectives, and I use a variety of methodological approaches (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method) in my research.

There are 14 included publications by Andrea G. Hunter :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Context and closure in children’s friendships: Prevalence and demographic variation 2006 2402 Third-grade children (N = 404) and their mothers completed questionnaires and participated in interviews designed to identify children’s friendships across the multiple contexts of their lives and to determine the strength of parent-to-parent ...
Counting on Grandmothers: Black Mothers' and Fathers' Reliance on Grandmothers for Parenting Support 1997 3279 This article examines Black young adult parents' reliance on grandmothers for parenting support. The sample of 487 parents, 18 to 34 years old, was drawn from the National Survey of Black Americans. Parents most often nominated grandmothers as the pe...
Diversity and Fluidity in Children's Living Arrangements: Family Transitions in an Urban Afro-American Community 1992 2322 The article presents a study exploring the evolution of urban African-American children's living arrangements in a community-defined population. African-American children are more likely than non-black children to spend significant portions of their ...
Feminist Attitudes Among African American Women and Men 1998 5142 Research on the intersection of race and gender suggests that for African Americans, racial inequality is more salient than gender inequality. However theoretical perspectives on the multiplicative effects of status positions and "outsider within" mo...
Links Between Social Network Closure and Child Well-Being: The Organizing Role of Friendship Context 2006 2970 Third grade children (N = 404) and their mothers completed questionnaires and participated in interviews designed to identify children’s friendships across multiple contexts, determine levels of social network closure for these friendships, an...
Loss, Survival, and Redemption: African American Male Youth’s Reflections on Life Without Fathers, Manhood, and Coming of Age 2006 3467 Using an interpretivist approach, this article explores young African American men’s (N= 20) reflections on coming of age and the meanings of father loss. Based on focus groups, the authors found that it was through autobiographical narratives of los...
Managing Children's Friendships Through Interparental Relationships: Roles of Ethnicity and Friendship Context 2007 2987 Twenty African American and European American mothers of fourth-grade students reflected on strategies for managing children's friend. ships maintained across a variety of contexts. Ethnicity differentially located families within specific social con...
The Other Breadwinners : the Mobilization of Secondary Wage Earners in Early Twentieth-Century Black Families 2001 1152 This study examines black families' reliance on secondary wage earners in Atlanta, GA during the early twentieth century (1900 and 1936). In periods of economic prosperity and decline, two-parent black families routinely relied on the employment of m...
Parental Racial Socialization and the Academic Achievement of African American Children: A Cultural-Ecological Approach 2011 6410 Using a cultural-ecological approach, this study examined: (a) associations between parental racial socialization and child academic achievement and (b) variations in these associations across child gender and family socio-economic status. Participan...
Private Pain, Public Choices: Influence of Problems in the Family of Origin on Career Choices Among a Cohort of MSW Students 2005 4776 This study draws on a survey of 126 graduate social work students from a large school of social work in the United States to investigate the impact of family problems on career choices. Sixty-nine percent of the students indicated they had a family h...
Race, Class, and Religious Differences in the Social Networks of Children and Their Parents 2012 3339 The study is a qualitative investigation of mothers’ perspectives about and their role in negotiating and developing intergenerational closure across race, class, and religious differences and their management of children’s diverse friendships. Black...
Racial Socialization of Biracial Youth: Maternal Messages and Approaches to Address Discrimination 2013 5520 We explored how mothers of biracial youth prepare their children to navigate diverse racial ecologies and experiences of racism and discrimination. A qualitative thematic analysis was used to identify racial socialization messages mothers used and em...
Strategies for Obtaining Parental Consent to Participate in Research 2003 8639 Researchers recruiting samples of children through schools typically face considerable challenges in obtaining completed consent forms from parents. Because children whose parents do not return consent forms are not able to participate in research, p...
Teaching classics in family studies: E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States 2006 8645 This paper (a) reintroduces E. Franklin Frazier's 1939 book, The Negro Family in the United States, to family scholars and graduate students and highlights its importance as a groundbreaking and classic text, (b) provides both an introduction to the ...