Poster #132 - Father Involvement and Children’s Resilience: The Impact of Implicit Identity on Masculine Characteristics

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Since the 1980s, individuals’ ability to recover from substantial adversity was defined as resilience (Rutter, 1985). Later researchers have revealed resilience is a dynamic process developed with the interaction of personal attributes and environmental factors mediated by individual’s internal mechanism (Connor & Davidson, 2003), which led to a wave of examining potentially protective, moderating or compensatory factors towards individual’s resilience (Masten & Wright, 2009). Among various protective factors, parental involvement has been regarded as one of the most significant protectors, especially for children (Armstrong, Birnie-Lefcovitch, & Ungar, 2005). However, more of the previous studies focused on the correlation between maternal involvement and children’s resilience, while the role of father involvement has been comparatively overlooked. Given that resilient individuals always showed typically masculine personalities (Yon, Joeng, & Goh, 2012), such as goal-oriented and socially dominant characteristics, we thereby hypothesize that father involvement associated with children’s resilience significantly by influencing children’s identity to masculine traits.
106 students (N = 54 male, 52 female) aged between11 to 13 in Hebei Province of China were tested. All participants were invited to finish the Developed Father Involvement Questionnaire and Connor & Davidson’s Resilience Scale, and then complete an Implicit Association Test to examine their implicit identity to masculine traits. We employed the method of structural equation modeling to examine the model hypothesized.
The result indicated a moderated mediation model between father involvement and children’s resilience (See Figure 1). In the model, children’s identities to masculine characteristics served as the mediation, and gender moderated the effect of father involvement on children's masculine identities. Generally, higher-level father involvement associated with higher scores of children’s identities to masculine characteristics, and therefore enhanced children’s resilience. However, the gender difference showed that only girls’ identities to masculine characteristics were significantly influenced by father involvement, while boys’ identities to masculine characteristics also highly depended on other factors. Specifically, Figure 2 demonstrated the moderation effect further examined.
This study discovered that father involvement played a vital role in promoting children's resilience, especially for girls. Different with the previous theory of sex model (Lamb & Tamis-Lemonda, 2004), which emphasized father’s role model for boy’s male identity, the present study found father could also influence girls’ implicit identity to masculine characteristics, and it even works more significantly than for boys. It could be explained by boys had multiple access to masculine traits other than their fathers, such as same-gendered peers and the influences from social culture. Nevertheless, as girls were normally encouraged to behave with feminine characteristics, especially in East Asian countries where typical gender roles were emphasized largely, girls were more easily impacted by interacting with their father to gain masculine characteristics. Consequently, children’s resilience was then built with more masculine traits. This finding provided researchers with a different empirical evidence to reconstruct the theories in the field of resilience, and it also suggested that educators needed to be aware of father’s role in promoting children’s resilience.

Authors

• Shaocong Ma, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
  Presenting Author

• Yuling Wang, Nanjing Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Xiaoping Li, Nanjing Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author