Session: Predictors of and Outcomes Associated with Father Involvement (Society for Social Work and Research 22nd Annual Conference - Achieving Equal Opportunity, Equity, and Justice)

Prior research suggests that paternal involvement positively affects families and children. For example, literature from social work and other social sciences shows that fathers are crucial for positive social, psychological, and cognitive outcomes in children of all ages. Although many studies have illustrated the impact of fathers on the lives of their children, gaps in the literature remain. The papers in this symposium address two of these gaps by addressing important, but overlooked predictors of father involvement and provide a more nuanced view of how father involvement impacts children over the life-course. As a result, the symposium has clear implications for future research, policy making, and social work practice with both individuals and families.

Methods

The four papers use diverse sampling and modeling strategies to consider questions around father involvement. The first paper uses linear regression with a new, national sample of fathers to suggest that paternal self-efficacy may be a resilience factor for depressed fathers. The second paper uses a mixed-methods approach to consider how coparenting alliance and relationship status impacts father involvement in a sample of non-residential African-American fathers. The third paper leverages logistic regression analyses in a sample of low-income Black women to consider how father involvement may influence early childbearing. The final paper uses nonparametric statistical analyses to consider how paternal assessments of developmental and socioemotional concerns match or fail to match well-established screening criteria.

Results

The four papers tell an important story about fathers, their involvement in parenting, and its impact on children. The first paper addresses an important, but overlooked barrier to father involvement—poor mental health. It then considers how the negative relationship between mental health and involvement may be moderated by paternal self-efficacy. The second paper provides one of the only mixed-methods analyses of how coparenting shapes father involvement in a racially marginalized group. It finds that coparenting, coupled with relationship status, strongly affects how involved non-residential parents are with their children. The third paper finds, counter to studies which compare racial/ethnic groups through mean-difference statistical testing, that father involvement is not predictive of delayed sexual activity and childbearing among low-income Black women. The final paper highlights the importance of father involvement by showing that fathers have little knowledge of child development and early learning and often wrongly assess their child's developmental trajectories.

Implications

This symposium contributes to the growing fatherhood literature in social work. Collectively, they acknowledge the significance of father involvement and consider the predictors of and outcomes associated with father involvement, particularly in diverse and marginalized populations. Importantly, when woven together, the four papers provide practitioners with recommendations for working with fathers in clinical, community, social service, health care, and policy settings. As a result, these papers help provide a foundation for additional research that moves the literature past descriptions of barriers to father involvement and toward the identification of empirically supported interventions with fathers.