Research Symposium

BIO

Niyle is a first-year student majoring in psychology and minoring in statistics. Through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, she is assisting Dr. Maria Cristina Ramos in her research on the cultural meanings of parental identities. Niyle has a passion for research and plans to study psychopharmacology in graduate school after earning her undergraduate degree.

Mapping the Cultural Meanings of Parental Identities

Abstract

This study maps meanings attached to parental identities (mother, father, and parent) as expressed in everyday parenting advice discourse. Grounded in identity theory, we conceptualize identities as the set of meanings attached to social positions by which one can define oneself. These meanings include traits, expectations, and other content that captures what it means to hold a given social position, such as being a mother, a husband, or a student. Using Parenting Stack Exchange (Q&A posts and responses), we identify and code statements that define what mothers, fathers, and parents are like and what they are expected to do. We develop a structured, human- and machine-readable codebook that captures key domains of meaning content (e.g., traits and behavioral expectations) and the normative status of claims (injunctive “what parents should do” vs. descriptive “what parents do”). We use the codebook to annotate the corpus with generative large language models (LLMs) and evaluate performance against a human-coded validation set. As substantive results are still in progress, we focus on the project’s theoretical framework, codebook, annotation pipeline, and validation design, and we outline planned analyses comparing meanings across mother and father identities. We also discuss advantages and limitations of this text-as-data approach for measuring identity meanings.

Keywords: Identity meanings, Culture, Parenthood, Content analysis, Identity theory