The Meaning of Family Health Among Mexican American First-Time Mothers and Fathers

Abstract

An ethnographic approach was used to obtain knowledge from the perspective of Mexican American first-time parents about the meaning of family health stated in their own words. The study was conducted in the Sullivan Division of Hidalgo County, Texas. Twenty-six families were followed longitudinally with a mean of eight (SD = 1.8) home visits per family. Audio-taped conversations with mothers and fathers in either English or Spanish were transcribed verbatim as recorded. The participants’ expressed meaning of family health emphasized family unity with joint parenting. Couples used a variety of metaphors to convey what family unity meant to them.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.