Assessing Change in Men's Commitment to Children

University Of Cincinnati, Cincinnati OH

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Calls for men's increased participation in family life have come from both the right and left sides of the political spectrum. Some studies suggest that men in the 1990s was a cultural ideal that men aspired to in principle but not in practice. The role of fathers in family life is a growing area of scholarship, but much remains unknown. For example, debates about the extent of men's time investments in their children has drawn little attention from scholars, and less attention has been paid to assessing change over time. Second, when considering the mutual influences of work and family, most scholars focus on work-to -family spillover, and pay les attention to the impact on family on men's work efforts. The proposed project will address these gaps in the literature. Using representative samples of the labor force drawn in 1977, 1992, and in 1997, this project will assess temporal change in two phenomena: 1) men's time investment in children, and 2) the influence of parenthood on men's work schedules. The analysis will decompose the observed change in men's commitment to their families into structural and behavioral components. In addition, cross-sectional analyses of family-induced restrictions on men's careers and the amount of unused vacation time will be performed. The goal of this project is to determine if the "new fathers" of the 1990s really are more "involved" in family life than was true a generation ago.