Gaining Ground from a Family and Cultural Legacy: A Teen Mother's Story of Repairing the World

A multigenerational longitudinal study of teen mothering provided prospective data on the intergenerational continuities and discontinuities in parenting traditions and caregiving legacies. Families that included a teen mother were first interviewed intensively in 1988–1989 and were reinterviewed in 1993, 1997, 2001, and 2005. All studies in the series were based on the phenomenology of everyday practices and the assumption that the self is constituted by practical, historical, and embodied understandings. Data were analyzed using the hermeneutic approach.