Father Involvement, Dating Violence, and Sexual Risk Behaviors Among a National Sample of Adolescent Females

This study explored the relationship between the involvement of biological fathers and the sexual risk behaviors and dating violence/victimization and/ or perpetration of adolescent girls. The data used in this cross-sectional analysis were drawn from the second wave of the public release of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Only adolescents who reported their biological sex as female, reported a history of being sexually active, and reported having a romantic partner in the previous 18 months were selected (N = 879). This study focused on overall positive sexual behaviors and use of contraception. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to best utilize capacity for dealing with latent variables and to test for possible mediation effects. The analysis demonstrated main effects of dating violence and father involvement on sexual behaviors. The more dating violence an adolescent girl experiences, the less likely she is to engage in healthy sexual behaviors. Likewise, the more involvement the biological father has in a woman’s life, the more likely she is to engage in positive sexual behaviors. Perceived father involvement was associated with risky sexual behaviors among sexually experienced adolescent girls. Dating violence was directly associated with risky sexual behaviors among sexually experienced adolescent girls, particularly non-White girls. Future studies should use longitudinal models and test theoretically and empirically guided potential mediators. Future studies should also consider father figures such as step-fathers and grandfathers in addition to biological fathers, as having a father figure may be a stronger predictor of adolescent sexual behaviors than having a biological connection

Father Involvement and Informal Kinship Care: Impacts on Child Wellbeing

The purpose of this study was to fill a gap in our knowledge regarding father involvement in informal kinship care and its impact on the emotional and behavioral wellbeing of children in care. Although this study was neither exclusively a fatherhood nor a child welfare study, it has the potential to contribute to the knowledge base of each area. The study was guided by the principles of family systems theory, which highlight the interconnectedness of family members and the ways in which family interactions impact individual wellbeing. This study specifically explored the relationship between two dimensions of father involvement, father-child contact and father-child relationship quality. These outcomes were specifically in relation to children living in informal kinship care for whom both biological parents have maintained some type of relationship with the child and kinship caregiver. The study’s hypotheses predicted that both father-child contact and father-child relationship quality would be inversely related to children’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors when controlling for factors that significantly predicted internalizing and externalizing behaviors in previous studies. Sub-hypotheses further predicted that mother-child, caregiver-mother, caregiver-father, and caregiver-child relationships would moderate the relationship between the two dimensions of father involvement and internalizing and externalizing behaviors. In addition, it was hypothesized that child’s gender, father’s residential status and whether or not the caregiver was a maternal or paternal relative would each serve as moderating variables. The GEE models, which tested these relationships, suggests that the both hypotheses were partially supported. Implications for social work practice, policy, education and research are discussed