| Summary: | There is a large body of work on the study of the
relationship between parenting and child personality, but very
little on the relationship between parenting and parental
personality characteristics, and more specifically fathers (Baruch
& Barnett, 1986b; Demo et al., 1987). The present research
focuses on the relationship between paternal involvement in child
care and the father's level of empathy and self esteem. A sample
of 52 subjects was drawn largely from the academic community
including 36 fathers and 16 non-fathers. This study is
correlational in nature, but the comparison sample of non-fathers
was used to determine any possible differences on the dependent
variables among father's level of involvement, and between nonfathers
and father's levels of paternal involvement. A
questionnaire administered to the fathers requested demographic
information, also contained the Empathic Concern (EC) and
Perspective-taking (PT) scales of the Interpersonal Reactivity
Index (Davis, 1980), the Rosenberg (1979) Self-esteem Scale (SE),
and the Paternal Involvement in Child Care Index (PI) by (Radin &
Harold-Goldsmith, 1985). The non-fathers received the same
package, but were not requested to answer the PI scale. Subhypotheses
for a relationship between recollection of paternal
involvement and present paternal involvement, and the relationship
between desire to become a parent and EC, PT, and SE, are also
explored.
The results indicated that there was not a significant
positive relationship between paternal involvement and any of PT, EC, or SE. Analyses of the within father, and father versus nonfather
groups indicates some support for higher self-esteem in the
high paternal versus low paternal involvement groups. An inverse
relationship is suggested between empathic concern and paternal
involvement. Near significant results support these findings in
the correlational analyses with paternal involvement. Findings
for sub-hypotheses include support for a positive relationship
between desire to father and perspective-taking for non-fathers.
Results suggest enough support for further research in this
area, including longitudinal research to determine potential
direction of effect for any relationship between father's
personality development specifically, or parents generally. === Education, Faculty of === Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of === Graduate
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