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Most of the literature on teenage pregnancy focuses on surface explanations of racism and poverty, or on experience-near constructs such as low self-esteem or depression. Deeper, clinically based studies that explore unconscious motivations as to why these adolescent girls become pregnant are often discounted as unscientific because they're deemed anecdotal and/or based on small samples. Dr. Dean's Teenage Pregnancy: The Interaction of Psyche and Culture is perhaps the first book in which psychoanalytic-developmental inquiries into the motives of teenage pregnancy are followed by structured interview of larger samples of subjects drawn from the same population. The research is conducted among poor, unwed adolescent African-Americans and their mothers living in a rural community in Louisiana. Within a dialectical perspective, the author applies her psychoanalytic inquiries both to individual psychological schema and cultural constructs. Drawing on the work of Erick Erikson (1963) and Hans Loewald (1978, 1980, 1988) Dr. Dean attempts to demonstrate how in this study population, such pregnancies are promoted by unconscious conspiracies between daughters and mothers.
The study consists of two separate phases. In the first or ethnographic phase of the study, the author spent one or two days a week for three years, visiting families and tutoring children whose parents thought they needed help. She would write extensive notes after each visit, summarizing her conversations and observations. She stopped these regular visitations after three years but returned to the community from time to time and continued her note writing during the second phase of the study. These notes were subsequently subjected to qualitative analysis to identify patterns of behavior and thought of teenagers and their mothers. The second phase of the study which also lasted three years consisted of formal interviews of 87 teenage girls and their mothers both individually and jointly using two semi-stru