Sandra Hofferth
University of Maryland
Sandra Hofferth has been actively involved in studying fathers for about 6 years, beginning with founding the Child Development Supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics in 1997. She is currently a Principal Investigator on the NICHD Family and Child Well-Being Research Network, and has collaborated with network members on a number of projects on fathers and fathering. She contributed time diary data to Charting Parenthood: A Statistical Portrait of Fathers and Mothers in America. As a member of the Methodology Working Group of the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, she contributed to the comprehensive report Nurturing Fatherhood (Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics 1998). As Principal Investigator of the 1997 Child Development Supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, she collected time diary information about children’s activities alone and with parents, added questions about fathering to the study, and obtained supplementary funding to add a sample of nonresidential fathers. Based upon the time diaries, Hofferth has conducted extensive analyses of fathers’ and mothers’ time with children. Her research found that fathers (and mothers) in two-parent families today spend more time with children than they did two decades ago. In collaboration with J. Pleck, she has examined the involvement of fathers and mothers with children both in residential and nonresidential settings across several data sets. She coauthored a review of the fatherhood literature with N. Cabrera and others.
Recent research focuses on differences in fathering by race/ethnicity, by biological relationship to child, and by marital relationship to the mother. Hofferth first explored the economic, cultural and community factors that might explain differences in fathering behavior. For example, differences in economic circumstances contribute to differences in paternal engagement and control, while differences in neighborhood characteristics contribute to differences in warmth. Cultural factors appear to explain differences from whites in control and responsibility on the part of both Blacks and Hispanics. Men’s reported own father involvement appears to be linked positively with involvement with children. She also focused upon differences in father involvement with children according to the biological relationship of child and residential father and the marital relationship between residential father and the child’s mother in two-parent families. This research suggests that differences between married stepfathers and biological fathers’ involvement with children are small when selection is removed, but cohabiting fathers are less involved than married fathers.
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