Father Involvement and Depression in Brazil (WITHDRAWN)

Purpose: Father involvement is correlated with positive outcomes for children and fathers. With these benefits we conclude that it is important for nations, communities, and clinicians to support and understand father involvement. There are many factors that influence father involvement including beliefs about gender roles, time spent at work, and mental health; this study will focus on depression. Factors such as race and culture can affect both depression and father involvement. Little research has been done on the involvement of Brazilian fathers. We will be addressing a gap in the literature by studying how depression affects father involvement in a Brazilian population and predict that there will be a negative correlation between the two.

Method: Data came from a larger study on Brazilian family development collected by Hollist, Miller, Falceto, & Ferdandes. We used the third collection of data, gathered in 2003. They were collected from families that had had a child in 2000. Variables we used from the data were depression (collected with and SRQ-20 scale), hours the fathers spent with the child in a day, and control variables (child’s gender, child’s health, child’s behavior, if the father was the biological father, if the father was working, and father’s income. We used OLS regression to calculate estimates.

Results: The hypothesis tested stated that depression scores would be related by spending less time with the child. In the first model, depression and time spent with child had a significant correlation (p = .022). After controlling for the control variables in the second model there was non-significance (p = .691) between depression and time spent with child. Coefficients show that every point increase on the depression scale is associated with a .095 increase in hours spent with the child. There was, however, significance between whether the companion was working and time spent with child (p < .001, coef. = -17.36). There was also significance in health (p = .003, coef. = 4.21,) and income (p = .034, coef. = -.002). The R-squared shows that the second model accounts for 70% of the variance in time spent with child, while the first model only accounts for 7%.

Implications: Clinicians should be aware of how economics affect the involvement of fathers. Higher income is correlated with parenting that uses more monitoring and control. This was something that was not reflected in our study do to its limitations of measuring father involvement as the amount of time the father spent with the child.