Negotiating family resilience amidst caretaking and employment constraints: a qualitative analysis of African American employed caregivers

ABSTRACT

Following the passage of the Minneapolis Sick and Safe Leave city ordinance, a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project was launched to examine the perceived accessibility and usage of paid sick leave by African American employed caregivers as a work-based family support tool. This paper presents qualitative findings from the Paid Sick Leave and African American Families study, in which four focus groups (n = 32) were conducted. Participants were employed African American caregivers from the Minneapolis metropolitan area. Participants discussed how the intersections of their work and family environments and how their families created family-level meaning making around employment, income, and family caregiving. Themes that arose from the focus groups were: (1) an importance of defining family for themselves expressed through kin affinity and family ascribed membership, (2) an expressed desire for their family to be together, (3) family prioritization over work conditions they felt was inconsiderate of their personal or family sense of worth and (4) family legacy expressed as the culmination of families’ prioritization, togetherness, and defined membership and is the intergenerational transmission of the family’s, identity. Implications for future research and policy are presented.

KEYWORDS:

• African American families
• caretaking
• CBPR
• employment
• paid sick leave
• family policy

Acknowledgement

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support from The Minneapolis Foundation. Thank you to Liberty Community Church and The Cultural Wellness Center for their contributions to this paper. Thank you to Dr. Catherine Solheim and Dr. Elizabeth Wieling, and the anonymous referees for their suggestions and comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Minneapolis Foundation [grant number CON000000063514]; Shirley L. & Peter D. Zimmerman Fund for Family Policy Fellowship, College of Education and Development, University of Minnesota; Ragnhild E. Edwardson Fellowship, College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota.

Notes on contributors

Renada M. Goldberg

Renada M. Goldberg, M.Ed., M.S.W., is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research interests examine the equity, design, and implementation of work-based family supports and family supportive policy solutions for marginalized communities.