The Involvement of Selected Unemployed and Employed Men with Their Children

Abstract

To determine whether hypotheses regarding structural predictors of father''s domestic work would be supported in a sample including unemployed men as they had been in samples of working fathers, a study was conducted of 48 intact, primarily working-class families with a preschool or kindergarten-aged child; 17 fathers were jobless and 31 were working. Multiple regression analysis, t tests, and Pearson product-moment correlatins were employed. As predicted, it was found that the most father involvement occurred in the total sample when the father was jobless and held a flexible view of the male role, the mother was working, and the target child was the oldest or close to it. The latter 3 variables also predicted paternal participation in families with employed fathers. In contrast, only sex-role ideology was associated with father involvement in families in which the father was without a job. The data are discussed in terms of theoretical and empirical literature in the field.