Frances Goldscheider
University of Maryland
Fran Goldscheider’s work on fatherhood began more than ten years ago, in a paper, “Fertility and commitment: Bringing men back in”, which argued that it is important to consider partner commitment in women’s fertility decisions. Her approach to studying fatherhood flows directly from her long-time interest in the living arrangements of adults. Her early work on the growth in nonfamily living among the oldest and youngest adults focused her attention on the importance of coresidence for family relationships. As her later work on marriage and the division of household labor raised the question of gender, this led her to question the ways that the increased separation of parenthood and marriage differentially affected mothers and fathers. Fatherhood for men increasingly has meant absent fatherhood, for the biological fathers who do not live with their children; and stepfatherhood, for the men who increasingly are living with their partners children from previous relationships.
Most research on men’s new family lives has focused on biological fathers; Goldscheider has focused more on stepfathers. She has studied the transition to stepparenthood in the US, Sweden (and Hungary), using datasets that focused primarily on the late 1980s and early 1990s. These studies found strong effects of childhood factors such as family structure, results recently reinforced by a study of attitudes towards becoming a stepparent. Her work has been recognized by inclusion in The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
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