Year: 2019
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: This dissertation makes small and important contributions to various literatures, especially fathering, domestic violence and child development literatures, and contributes to efforts in making fathers visible to research and as influencers of child development. In the two papers presented, fathers are made visible in two ways – first by examining ways to recruit them and then by examining their impact on child development. This first paper examined the challenges involved in recruiting fathers with and without a history of domestic violence into longitudinal research. Recruitment data were collected on 257 fathers over an eight-month timeframe. Results indicated violent fathers and their families required similar efforts to recruit initially as fathers without a DV history, but required more effort for follow-up. Tests of two specific recruitment strategies demonstrate advantages of in-person and immediate scheduling of research appointments. Finally, descriptive information is provided on the time and resources required for recruiting DV fathers into research. This second paper sought to understand the fathering processes impacting children’s development with 60 father-child dyads diverse in terms of men’s level of parenting risk. Explored were the relationships between fathers’ internal emotional capacity/competence (i.e., emotion recognition, perspective taking, narcissistic features, emotional regulation skills) and child emotion dysregulation, with fathers’ emotional socialization practices (i.e., use of supportive and unsupportive behaviours with their children) as potential mediators of this relationship. Only one out of eight mediation models hypothesized were supported: Fathers’ emotion recognition accuracy mediated the relationship between fathers’ unsupportive socialization practices and child dysregulation. Exploratory analyses also revealed a moderating role of fathers’ history of DV perpetration on fathers’ emotion competence and child dysregulation such that fathers’ emotion dysregulation and child dysregulation was significantly and positively related within a domestic violence context but not in a non-DV context. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Amanda Dyson
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3157096904