On Mothers and Measures: The (Re)Production of Mothering Ideologies in Psychological Measures of Motherhood
Abstract
Across disciplines, researchers look to motherhood as a site of theorization about the growth and wellbeing of the population because of their important role in biological and social reproduction. Psychologists frequently study motherhood and as such play an important role in producing an ideal maternal subject. Past research has shown that the measurement tools we use in psychology are laden with bias, stereotypes, and ideologies about the group being studied and as such are producing ideologically charged results that filter into the world under the semblance of scientific objectivity (McClelland et al., 2020). Using critical measurement analysis, I found that an item bank of psychological survey items that measure attitudes towards motherhood rely on neoliberal and essentialist ideologies to construct the maternal subject. These ideologies were occasionally mirrored in the lived experiences of a small sample of North American mothers, but mothers also worked to resist these ideologies and construct alternative narratives. Quantitative measures of motherhood used in psychological research dichotomize motherhood and provide us with a framework for categorizing the ideal maternal subject. However, mothers are adept at resisting and rewriting narratives of good motherhood. Expansion of best practices in survey development is discussed to mitigate the presence of ideologies in our measurement tools.