Filho és, pai serás...: a percepção retrospectiva dos homens acerca das formas de envolvimento do seu próprio pai e suas consequências desenvolvimentais

Abstract

In the present study we explore the extent to which men's retrospective perception about their father's involvement throughout their childhood and adolescence relates to the perceived developmental consequences of such involvement. We used two measures: INVOLVE (Lima, Serôdio, & Cruz, 2008) which taps the ways of own father's involvement retrospectively perceived by the individual, and PerCIF (Lima et al., 2008), which focus the perceived developmental consequences of father's involvement. The study was conducted with 218 men living in the metropolitan area of Porto. INVOLVE revealed a 5 component factorial structure. In the whole, participants considered that their father was more involved as a Breadwinner and moral support, followed, by his involvement as Emotional support and stimulation, his Accessibility for school and social activities, his Sharing of housekeeping duties with the mother, and, finally, by means of Negative involvement (e.g. punishment). Amongst other results, we found that younger participants (less than 40 years old), consider that, in the whole, their father was more involved in their developmental process. The 3 components of PerCIF indicate three major types of developmental consequences. Amongst these, participants consider that father's involvement was consequential in the kind of Relationships they undertook with significant others. Results also show that involvement forms entailing direct and positive participation of the father are highly correlated with perceived developmental consequences. Indeed, those involvement forms are the only predictors of these perceived consequences. We discuss the relevance of these results in light of current research on the developmental consequences of father's involvement.