Helen Norman

Measuring paternal involvement in childcare and housework

There is currently no quantitative tool for measuring paternal involvement in childcare and housework. To address this, we run Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) on a sample of households from the 2001-02 sweep of the UKs Millennium Cohort Study. Two quantitative measures of paternal involvement in childcare and housework are derived for when the child is aged nine months old, which appear to be isomorphic with two dimensions of Michael Lambs paternal involvement: engagement and responsibility. Two, moderately correlated latent variables are produced, which are then used to explore employment and socio-demographic characteristics of involved fathers. Our results show that paternal engagement and responsibility are correlated, albeit weakly, with fathers’ employment hours, education and gender role attitudes. The strongest correlation is with mothers’ employment hours, which suggests that mothers’ employment schedules are more important than fathers’ for fostering paternal involvement when the child is aged nine months old. There are also variations in paternal engagement and responsibility according to ethnicity, which suggests cultural differences might interact with the ability of fathers to be involved. This highlights the need for further exploratory analyses on variations of paternal involvement by different ethnic classifications, which has been fairly limited to date.

Young Adults Navigating European Labour Markets

Across Europe young people face considerable challenge and uncertainty in entering the labour market and securing employment as a basis for establishing themselves as independent adults (see Chapters 1 and 3). Blossfeld et al. (2005) contend that the unprecedented level of structural uncertainty that globalisation processes generate in contemporary societies have a particularly strong impact on young people, and that the increased labour market uncertainties that they experience affect other parts of their lives. The extent and form of these uncertainties are shaped by national institutional differences and the familiar contours of socio-economic stratification, including gender, education and ethnic-minority status. Nonetheless, the general picture is that young people enter labour markets in which the opportunities for full-time, secure and decently paid employment have been eroded by high rates of unemployment, temporary and/or involuntary part-time contracts and low pay.

Which Fathers Are Involved in Caring for Preschool-Age Children in the United Kingdom? A Longitudinal Analysis of the Influence of Work Hours in Employement on Shared Childcare Arrangements in Couple Households

Fathers still put less time than mothers into the domestic tasks involved in looking after their children but across European countries, Australia, and North America, they are more involved than was the case for fathers 20 or 30 years ago (Hook, 2006). Gender inequalities are less pronounced in some countries, for example, Sweden, compared to other Western states (e.g., Craig and Mullen, 2011; Sullivan et al., 2009; OECD, 2010; Hook, 2006) and there is household variation within countries (Raley et al., 2012; Norman et al., 2014).