Urban American Indians: A Comparison of Father Involvement Predictors across Race.

ANALYSIS of variance; BLACK people; CHI-squared test; CONFIDENCE intervals; STATISTICAL correlation; EPIDEMIOLOGY; FACTOR analysis; FATHER-child relationship; INDIGENOUS peoples of the Americas; INTERVIEWING; LONGITUDINAL method; METROPOLITAN areas; PARENTING; RACE; SCALE analysis (Psychology); DATA analysis; RESIDENTIAL patterns; STRUCTURAL equation modeling; FAMILY systems theory; FATHERS' attitudes; ATTITUDES of mothers; DATA analysis software; DESCRIPTIVE statistics

Father involvement in families of urban American Indians has been a neglected area of research. In this study, the authors examined the associations among parental relationship quality, father involvement, and coresidence. The authors conducted a multiple group analysis through structural equation modeling comparing 107 American Indian fathers with fathers of the general population in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Although the results were similar between groups, findings indicated two key differences for urban American Indians. First, emotional supportiveness had a stronger relationship with physically active engagement for American Indian fathers. Second, parental relationship quality had greater total standardized effects on American Indian father engagement than did coresidence. When developing culturally sensitive supports to increase American Indian father involvement, these findings imply that this will be best achieved through increasing the couple's relationship quality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Social Work Research is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)