Digital Dads: Examining Fathers' Narratives of Identity, Experience, and Ideology in Blogs

• In Event: 4467 - Section on Social Psychology Refereed Roundtables (Cosponsored with Section on Sociology of Emotions)
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 5: Family Effects

Abstract

Online discourse about parenthood has grown with the expansion of social media technologies. Scholars have begun to examine how parents use social media to create and share narratives about family and parenting. In this paper, I present a qualitative analysis of 203 blog posts written by 41 fathers in North America. My analytical approach is framed by social psychological insights that explain how fatherhood is socially constructed across lines of identity, experience, and ideology. Drawing on a variety of textual excerpts, I illustrate how fathers’ online narratives about becoming a “good” father, performing caregiving tasks, and negotiating work-family balance both reinforce and resist dominant cultural understandings about parenthood. In discussing my findings, I also consider how social media are used as a part of fathering in everyday life and as public tools to help promote involved fatherhood in society.

Author

• Casey Scheibling, McMaster University