A book review by Edin, Kathryn, and Maria Kefalas. 2007. Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. Berkeley, University of California Press.IntroductionThe rise of single parenthood creates another phenomenon of restructuring of the American family. Poor mothers who deviate from the norms of middle-class marriage and motherhood are continually blamed by politicians and the general population in public discourse as the reason for the existence of poverty. Nonetheless, the authors, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, take it upon themselves to present the many stories of 162 young, low-income single mothers living in the poorest communities of Philadelphia and the nearby city of Camden, New Jersey, to understand the reasons why single parenthood has multiplied since the 1950s. Edin and Kefalas provide great insight into not only motherhood in low-income communities, but also their attempt to postpone marriage by choosing not to delay pregnancy. It is through this ethnographic study that we see the emergence of a redefinition of marriage in American society that has not only affected low-income families, as we might conclude, but also middle-class families. Edin and Kefalas' research goes beyond preconceived notions of low-income single mothers' welfare dependency and provides them with a sense of freedom and to some extent autonomy from the ideology of the typical American family. Summary The authors' original purpose is to find out why poor women in low-income neighborhoods decide to have children out of wedlock and why they do not marry. The authors' objective diverged from their original thesis and focused more on the search for an explanation to understand the roles that... at the center of the article... in the book can only concern the population of interest and therefore could be useless to the rest of the population. Finally, individuals in the sample may not have an objectifiable understanding of what is happening in their lives. The second issue I encountered in this study was reliability and validity. The authors conducted an ethnographic study using direct, unstructured interviews and intensive participatory observation. These methods allow researchers to obtain in-depth information instead of using surveys or censuses. As a result, the authors were able to find unexpected information and insights. The problem is that yes, the authors conducted repeated qualitative interviews, but this did not achieve reliability or validity because I noticed that the situations of these poor single mothers usually changed and presented unstable information.Conclusion