Phenomenology of the Consequences of Women Heads of households' Perceptions of Social Support

Today, the number of female heads of households is increasing all over the world, especially in Iran, while everyone agrees that they are a vulnerable group, which needs to be supported. This support is often provided by families and friends, as well as governmental and quasi-governmental institutions. However, it seems that their perceptions about these supports are more important than the supports themselves. This study was designed with the aim of investigating these women’s perceptions about social support.

In this research, which was conducted through the phenomenological method, 21 participants from among the women heads of households in Mashhad City were selected by using a targeted method in the fall of 2022. Then, the maximum distribution process was followed until the theoretical saturation was reached. The participants told their stories about the mentioned supports during a semi-structured interview. After the completion of the interview phase, all the narratives were carefully reviewed and coded to provide the necessary background for comparison, classification, and recognition of differences. Again, the extracted classes were examined to see if they had 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 results.

The findings showed that the women heads of households were basically supported by the three sources of family, friends, and governmental and semi-governmental institutions. These supports were provided in the forms of emotional, instrumental, informational, and financial supports based on proximity to the recipients. Families offered them emotional and economic supports, but opposed their presence in the public arena. Friends offered a wider range of support to these women, including emotional, advisory, economic, occupational, and spiritual supports. Also, government departments and non-governmental organizations helped to develop their professional skills by holding empowerment courses in addition to providing economic aids, while the economic assistance of these institutions, could provide reproduction of poverty and debt crisis for many of these women if it were not consistent with the perspective of poverty alleviation. The interviewees believed that the strangers’ supports would put them under suspicion, so they avoided being close to any sources of support that might harm them. Also, mistrust, instability, and poisoning of the atmosphere had cast a shadow on the lives of the majority of them. The majority of the female heads of households showed a priority to go to their families and friends to receive emotional supports and some of them turned to official institutions to receive economic supports. However, the cultural consequences of widowhood, divorce, or celibacy had caused most of their interactions with these women. Almost all of them did not trust men and wanted their temporary presence while "living apart" just to meet their needs in most cases. Therefore, the mistrust, instability, and poisonous nature of the relationships, especially relationship with the opposite sex, cast a shadow on their request for support from all the three sources of family, friends, and governmental institutions, which provided the basis for appearance of contradictory perceptions of these supports. The two main axes of "trying to distance" and "rethinking a relationship" covered their perceptions of receiving supports. Due to lack of trust, some of them tried to distance themselves from others and minimize their levels of communication in this plagued atmosphere, while some others had created a kind of rethinking in receiving social support, ignoring the people’s judgments around them, and looking to meet their needs. On the other hand, the majority of the female heads of households had transferred their links to some groups in cyberspace; yet, the concerns of the real world were still there for them, except that the virtual space had increased their powers of bargaining and choosing. At the beginning of the loss of a spouse, the widows mostly needed an emotional support and as the mourning period passed, they showed their financial, instrumental, and informational needs. The divorced women also needed more emotional support at the beginning of separation and then they craved for other supports. This was while the single women prioritized financial, instrumental, informational, and finally emotional independence, respectively. The results revealed that the society defined a new identity for the women, who had become the heads of households. Therefore, they defined their relations with the society in a special framework that they mostly did not benefit from. The feelings of rejection and isolation, pity, alienation, insecurity, and discomfort were among these consequences. In such an environment, these women tried to use various solutions, such as hiding their guardianship, returning to their paternal families, defining new relationships, distorting social relations, restoring their identities, and overcoming the anxiety and psychological disturbance caused by guardianship. Such a lived experience, on the one hand, isolated and rejected them from within their groups, but on the other hand forced them to expand the radius of their social relations to secure a living and establish new relationships outside their groups. Naturally, social class is a determining factor in obtaining the opportunities and facilities that people have and can be the source of different inequalities. Therefore, being in a social class is an inevitable part of people's identities. 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 households have been formed, examination of their perceptions in their social classes and the feelings that come along with them have been an omitted element. However, examining individuals in their social classes is important because they can be a source of inequality. In this direction and in the context of time, families, friends, and governments have tried to promote women heads of households, who are in lower classes, to higher classes with their supports. Many of these studies show that the dissolution of the marital relationship is basically a stressful stage in the life of every female head of 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 her family, friends, and official and unofficial institutions and redefining the people she is used to hanging out with are among her new relationships. Even now her social relations expand 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 narratives of the studied women heads of households about social supports showed that they tended to be supported by their families and friends. This result confirmed Habermas’s idea in this field: “Basically, a distinction should be made between the rationality of the social system (official body) and the rationality of the life world (informal groups).”