| Father involvement is a critical aspect of family life with implications for child and parental physical and socioemotional health, couple relationship quality, and union stability. Yet, father involvement has been almost exclusively investigated in married families, most often via maternal-reports that underestimate involvement and with unidimensional or global measures of father involvement despite evidence that suggests father involvement is multidimensional. Pathways to family formation in the U.S. are increasingly diverse; over 40% of births now occur to unmarried women, at least 60% of whom are cohabiting with their child's father, and approximately 40% of whom will remain in a longer-term cohabitation (more than one year). Hence, there is a significant need for research on father involvement among diverse families.;This project advances scholarship on father involvement by empirically testing the most recent multidimensional conceptualization of father involvement among married and continuously cohabiting families during a critical period in the life course: the transition to parenthood. Further, this project bridges the sociological and psychological literatures on married and unmarried father involvement by utilizing multimethod and multidimensional measures of father involvement from two key data sources. The New Parents Project is a short-term, longitudinal study of a community sample of first-time, dual-earner parents that includes paternal self-report questionnaires, videotaped observations, and time-diary data that were exploited to test Pleck's (2010) conceptualization of father involvement for married fathers. The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a nationally-representative sample of births to married and unmarried parents in large U.S. cities provides self-reports of involvement from unmarried fathers, a group historically absent in research on father involvement (Coley, 2001), and was used to test Pleck's conceptualization of father involvement for continuously cohabiting fathers and compare father involvement across fathering contexts (i.e., marriage/cohabitation).;In Chapter 1, I provide a brief introduction into the changing family landscape in the U.S. and implications for fathers' roles in family life. In Chapter 2, I draw on the New Parents Project to test recent father involvement theory in married families using structural equation modeling (SEM) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Chapter 3 tests this same theory in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study using CFA and a multiple groups approach to test for differences in the structure and composition of father involvement across fathering context. Cluster Analysis was also used to validate latent involvement factors and identify groups of fathers based on the saliency of the involvement domains. In Chapter 4, I use the measures of involvement constructed in Chapter 3 to explore the multidimensional development of father involvement over children's early years (ages 1-3) using reciprocal structural equation models. Finally, I close by offering my final thoughts and conclusions about the study as a whole in Chapter 5. |
