Comparing Father and Mother Reports of Father Involvement among Low-Income MinorityFamiliesAuthor(s): Rebekah Levine Coley and Jodi Eileen MorrisSource: Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Nov., 2002), pp. 982-997Published by: National Council on Family RelationsNational Council on Family RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3599997Accessed: 09/12/2010 16:19

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REBEKAH LEVINE COLEY AND JODI EILEEN MORRIS Boston College

Comparing Father and Mother Reports of Father

Involvement Among Low-Income Minority Families

Currently available data and concerns about the validity of reports by mothers significantly trun- cate the ability of researchers to address a myriad of research questions concerning the involvement of fathers in families. This study aimed to inform this concern by examining predictors of father in- volvement and father-mother discrepancies in re- ports of involvement within a low-income, pre- dominantly minority sample of families with both resident and nonresident fathers (n = 228). Paired hierarchical linear models were used to control for the interrelation between pairs of re- porters. The results indicate that although fathers' and mothers' reports are similar, mothers consis- tently report lower levels of involvement than do fathers. Parental conflict, fathers' nonresidence, and fathers' age, as well as mothers' education and employment, predicted larger discrepancies between fathers' and mothers' reports.

Interest in fathers' roles and behaviors in families has grown exponentially in the past 2 decades as changing social norms and demographic patterns have vastly altered societal views of paternal re- sponsibility. Two distinct yet intertwined arenas of

fathering are gaining high levels of attention and concern from policymakers, researchers, and the public. First, the growing rates of nonmarital births and marital dissolutions in American fami- lies have attracted attention to issues concerning unmarried fathers' contact with and financial sup- port of their children, which have been captured in public policies concerning paternity establish- ment, child support, and public support (e.g., wel- fare) of poor children and families (Federal Inter- agency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, 1998). Second, as family structures and roles have grown more diverse, interest has grown dramati- cally in delineating how and why fathers influence children's healthy growth and development in both married and unmarried families (Cabrera, Tamis-LeMonda, Bradley, Hofferth, & Lamb, 2000; Coley, 2001; Tamis-LeMonda & Cabrera, 1999). In short, questions concerning the amount, type, and impact of fathers' involvement with their children and families are arising.

Although these issues present a plethora of in- triguing research questions, researchers are strug- gling in their attempts to study the domain of fa- ther involvement with currently available data and methods, particularly with regard to low-income families and families in which the father does not reside with his children. This dearth of informa- tion stems from three primary causes: simplistic measurement regarding father involvement, fa- thers' nonparticipation in research studies of child development and family functioning, and con- cerns about the validity of mothers' reports of fa-

Department of Counseling Developmental and Educational Psychology, Lynch School of Education, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 (coleyre@bc.edu).

Key Words: father involvement, low-income families, non- resident parents, paired hierarchical linear models, paren- tal conflict, reporter agreement.

982 Journal of Marriage and Family 64 (November 2002): 982-997

Father-Mother Reports 985

sey & Craig, 1998; Rangarajan & Gleason, 1998; Stier & Tienda, 1993; Sullivan, 1993), and father race or ethnicity (with African Americans report- ing higher levels of involvement; Lerman, 1993; Seltzer, 1991) to predict higher levels of father involvement, with mixed findings for child gender and less attention paid to the mother's character- istics. In addition, family relationships appear im- portant, with numerous studies reporting a link be- tween father-mother conflict and lower levels of father involvement (Coley & Chase-Lansdale, 1999; Furstenberg, 1995; McKenry, Price, Fine, & Serovich, 1992; Nelson et al., 1999). Given these findings, one might hypothesize that these same factors (child, parent, and couple character- istics) would be important in predicting both the level of father involvement and the discrepancy between fathers' and mothers' reports of father involvement.

SUMMARY

Currently, we are at an impasse with regard to the use of mother report data on father involvement because of concerns over validity and reporter bias, and this impasse limits our ability to address both theoretical and policy-driven questions. A greater understanding of the congruence between fathers' and mothers' reports of father involve- ment and of the conditions under which pairs are more or less in agreement will help to inform questions concerning whether the use of mothers' reports is methodologically defensible. This infor- mation, in turn, will help in the interpretation of findings of published research involving mother report methodologies and in the planning new data collection strategies.

METHOD

The data for this paper are drawn from a subsam- ple of families (n = 228) from the first wave of Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three City Study, a longitudinal multimethod analysis of the impact of federal welfare reforms on children, parents, and families analyzed by Winston et al. (1999). The Three City Study involves three in- terrelated components. First, there is a survey component with a stratified random sample of 2,402 children and their primary female caregiv- ers in low-income families (family incomes of less than 200% of the federal poverty line) living in low-income urban neighborhoods in Boston, Chi- cago, and San Antonio. Deemed eligible from the

household screening of over 40,000 households (with a 90% screening rate), 82.5% of the families agreed to participate in in-home interviews, re- sulting in an overall response rate of 74%. In el- igible households, interviewers randomly selected one child and conducted cognitive assessments (for all children) and in-person interviews (for children aged 10-14), as well as interviews with the child's primary female caregiver (see Winston et al., 1999, for further information on the sample and study components). At the time of the first wave of data collection in 1999, 32% of the fam- ilies were receiving cash welfare payments and 73% had incomes below the federal poverty line. Thirty-two percent of the mothers were married, and 6% were cohabiting. The sample was 53% Hispanic, 41% African American, and 6% non- Hispanic White.

The second component of the Three City Study is the Embedded Developmental Study, which provides a more intensive view of the lives of the 2- to 4-year-old children and their families from the survey sample. This component includes in- terviews with biological fathers, videotaped as- sessments of children and additional interviews with mothers, and observations of child-care set- tings and interviews with child-care providers. The third component is an ethnographic study of 215 families residing in the same neighborhoods as the survey families who have been followed for approximately 12 months with in-depth inter- views and participant observation.

Father and mother interview data from the em- bedded developmental study component provide the primary focus for the current analyses. Our sample includes 228 families for which we have information from main survey interviews of mothers, embedded developmental study inter- views of mothers, and embedded developmental study interviews of fathers. All children who were 2 to 4 years old at the time of the collection of the main survey data were eligible to participate in the embedded developmental study. For the mother component, the response rate was 85% (n = 626). For the father component, the response rate varied depending on residence status and lev- el of involvement. On the basis of mothers' re- ports of fathers' residence and contact with the focal child, the response rate for fathers who re- sided in the child's household was 75% (n = 97), and that for fathers who had had contact with their child within the year prior to the survey was 37% (n = 161), for an overall rate of 45%. (The low response rate stems from multiple factors, includ-