Abstract

Numerous female-headed single parent households face increased pressure when attempting to balance income generation with household responsibilities, such as family nutrition, which is critical given its greater influence on children’s nutrition and diet quality (Hebestreit et al., 2017). This situation is critical in light of the fact that food is positioned as a critical domain of human well-being (Schnettler et al., 2014, 2017; Denegri et al., 2014, 2016). Satisfaction with food-related life is conceptualized as an individual’s global cognitive evaluation of his or her diet (Grunert, Dean, Raats, Nielsen, y Lumbers, 2007); its formal definition is connected to other facets of life such as health, family, and social relation-ships (Grunert et al., 2007). According to the literature, satisfaction with food-related life is defined in terms of three primary determinants of eating behavior: the food consumed, the individual, and the diet’s context (Köster, 2009). The purpose of this study is to contribute to our understanding of female-headed single-parent families and their meanings by examining the importance placed on the family as the first social space in which people construct and shape their social representations in various spheres of daily life (Moscovici, 1984). The overall objective is to investigate the meanings of satisfaction with food-related life for mothers and adolescent children in female-headed single-parent families. The specific objectives are to i) define the semantic entities of food satisfaction in relation to mothers and adolescent children, ii) identify factors that contribute to mothers’ and adolescent children’s food satisfaction, and iii) compare how mothers and adolescent children perceive their food satisfaction and the factors that contribute to it increasing. To accomplish these goals, a mixed case study research design was used. This entails combining quantitative and qualitative research methods in order to gain a better understanding of the research issues (Cresswell y Plano Clark, 2011). A total of 47 Chilean single-parent families with a female head of household participated in this study. It consists of a fee-paying mother that has at least one adolescent child between the ages of 10 and 17. The data collection method was an inter-view developed and tested in the Chilean population by Schnettler et al. (2020), based on a projective technique (Mesas y Escribano, 2018), in which mothers and adolescent children individually responded to the first words, terms, or phrases associated with the expression “being satisfied with my food-related life” with the goal of determining the meaning of satisfaction with food-related life. They were then asked to complete the sentence “I would be more satisfied with my food-related life if…”. In order to identify factors that could improve their satisfaction with food-related life. The data was textually analyzed by segmenting and coding it. Subsequently, by