Summary Of Journal Article In Defense Of Parenthood

In Defense of Parenthood
Summary of original peer-reviewed journal article: The journal article, In Defense of Parenthood: Children Are Associated with More Joy Than Misery, discussed how researchers measured the correlation of happiness, positive emotion, and meaning or sense of purpose in life between parents and non-parents. These were the key variables. This experiment was implemented to try to invalidate previous claims that parents find less joy in life than nonparents. Previous experiments used divergent methods, which were not as reliable. The researchers completed three studies, that each used diverse types of methods, measurements, people, and spans of time. They used a convergent method to interpret the results in a significant

Summary of media article covering the research: In the media article, “Parents are Happier Than Non-Parents,” the journalist summarizes the original peer-reviewed article, In Defense of Parenthood. She shares the findings that the studies found in that parents are happier than nonparents with the exception that fathers have higher incidence of happiness and that single and young parents often have lower scores. She discusses how stress and responsibility have an affect on woman, younger and single parents in ways that reduce their positive feelings and meaning in life. The journalist contrasts the experiments in this article with one from 2006, that found parents had more incidents of depression. She also mentions a study from 2011, that suggests parents fake being happy when confronted with the financial challenges of parenthood. She then briefly describes the studies from In Defense of Parenthood and their findings. She uses quotes from the researchers to generalize and connect the findings. Much of the article is pieced together with quotes from the researchers and excerpts from the article

It, however, does lead the audience to perceive the article differently than they could if given the complete information. For instance; she doesn’t mention the finding that older nonparents have similar life satisfaction as parents. It also does not mention that in the first study mothers showed no increase in the variables, whereas fathers did.
The journalist mentions a study that was published with finding that kids can be depressing and that parents in the study have higher levels of depression to contrast with the article being presented. However, the original article contrasted with the work of a study done on working Texas mothers (Nelson, Kushlev, English, Dunn, & Lyubomirsky, 2012, p. 3).
The issue with the article arose in the discussion of the procedures of the study. The journalist only went into basic details regarding the first study. She mentioned that there was a total of three, but there was no further reference to them or how the finding was related to that specific study other than the type of variable