The interweave of fathers' daily work experiences and fathering behaviors

Fathering, Fall, 2004 by Daniel A. McDonald, David M. Almeida

In addition, fathers were on average 40 years old and had approximately two children in the household with an average age of 13 years. The average family income was $38,000. Nearly two-thirds of spouses were involved in gainful employment.

Over the course of eight consecutive evenings, NSDE respondents completed short telephone interviews about their daily experiences. Data collection spanned an entire year (March 1996 to March 1997) and consisted of 40 separate "flights" of interviews with each flight representing the eight-day sequence of interviews from approximately 38 respondents. The initiation of interview flights was staggered across the day of the week to control for the possible confounding between day of study and day of week. Respondents completed an average of seven of the eight interviews, resulting in a total of 10,374 daily interviews. For the present analysis, 290 fathers with children in the household under 21 years of age are used, resulting in 2030 interview days. For the purposes of the present study, only days that fathers reported being engaged in paid work were used, resulting in approximately 1,450 study days.

MEASURES

Data for the NSDE telephone interview were collected over the course of eight consecutive evenings. These interviews included questions about daily experiences in the past 24 hours concerning time use, productivity and cutbacks, and daily work/family stressors. The time frame for all of the measures was the previous 24 hours or since the previous telephone call. The advantage of using a daily measurement is that it reduces problems associated with retrospective recall by having fathers report on experiences much closer to the time they occurred. Larson and Richards (1994) found that the transmission of emotions between fathers and their children occurred most often in the evening upon the father's arrival home from work. However, such a sequencing of events is not always the case, as many parents can relate to hurried mornings trying to get children off to school. Therefore, a limitation to this method is that we are unable to distinguish precisely when and in what order events occurred with the previous 24-hour period.

Fathers' home experiences were assessed via measures of child-related stressors, hours with children, and emotional support provided to children. These measures of fathering represent both quantitative and qualitative aspects of the father-child relationship (Almeida et al., 2001).

Child-related stressors. Child-related stressors were assessed through the semi-structured Daily Inventory of Stressful Events described above (DISE, Almeida, Wethington, & Kessler, 2002). The inventory consists of a series of stem questions asking whether certain types of events had occurred in the past 24 hours along with a set of guidelines for probing affirmative responses.

The aim of the interviewing technique was to acquire a short narrative of each event that included descriptive information (e.g., tensions with children over household chores, family demands involving children) as well as what was at stake for the respondent. All of the interviews were tape-recorded then transcribed and coded for several characteristics. Expert raters initially coded each stressor into one of seven broad classifications (i.e., interpersonal tensions, work/education, home, finances, health/accident, network, miscellaneous) and then further categorized into 54 specific classifications depending on the content of the stressor (e.g., interpersonal tensions involving respect, work overloads, work breakdowns, work mistakes, family demands). The focus of involvement was also assessed to determine if the event involved only the respondent, only a person other than the respondent, or jointly the respondent and another person. For events involving only others or both the respondent and another person, the respondent was asked the relationship of the other person involved (e.g., spouse, coworker, child).