In the area of children and adolescent development psychology, researchers have been focusing on the importance of motherhood and mother-child relashionship. In the past 20 years, there are more and more researchers in west coutries have come to realize that fathers and fatherhood also have great significance for children’s development, while in China the research of father involvement and fatherhood is still very scarce. In this study, 1565 households from three province were recruited to participate in the research. A set of questionnaires (Father Involvement Scale, Scale of Parenting Styles, questionaire of demographic information, father-children relationship questionaire, questionaire of mother’s attitute to father involvement) were given to the parents and called back in a weekend. The researcher’s purpose is to make a measure of father involvement for Chinese family, to discribe the involvement situation of father in China and its influencing factors, and to explore the relationship between father involvement and parents’ parenting styles. The main results are as followings: 1. On the basis of in-depth interviews and literature review, the Father Involvement Scale was made. The results of item analysis, reliability and validity analysis, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis showed that the scale’s indicators meet the statistical requirements. 2. Characteristics of children and father involvement: level of father involvement had no significant differences on children’s sex. The fathers of children in primary schools had higher involvement level than father of children in pre-school and junior high school. 3. Characteristics of father and father involvement: the higher level of education the father had, the higher level of involvement he had. However, the father with different personal income had similar involvement level. 4. Household characteristics and father involvement: father of different household income had different levels of involvement. Father from the family with median household income involved in the highest level. In addition, if the mother had high personal income, their husbands were more supportive of the mother to take care of the child's work. In mothers’ view, the most important father’s work is “concerned about the child's school performance and provide support and assistance, "the least important father’s work is " to take care of the child's daily life. 5. Father involvement and parenting styles: the higher level the father involved in children’s life, the more democratic parenting styles he had; the lower level the father involved in children’s life, the worse parenting styles he had. Fathers who involved high both in attitute and behavior had the best parenting styles, followed by the fathers who involved high in behavior and low in attitute. Fathers who involved low both in attitute and behavior had the worst parenting styles.
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