This is a followup to the Stay-At-Home Father survey posted previoulsly mentioned here (http://www.athomedad.org/node/233). The researcher, Aaron Rochlen, writes:

Hi - I appreciated you posting about the survey. Below is a detailed explanation of the project for those interested. I don't have results quite yet (will be a few months likely), but based on reading the posts it seemed like a few people misunderstood the goals of the project. And below provides a lot of detail on what the study was and was not!!!

Dear SAHF research participants,

Thank you so much to EVERYONE who participated in this research project and for sharing the link with others. I am truly grateful for your help.
I'm writing with an update and a more detailed description of the goals of this project. We are thrilled to report that approximately 250 SAHFs have completed the survey (and we will be pulling the link soon).

Before getting to what we are looking at, it seemed important to clarify what we did NOT intend to do. This is partly based on a few e-mails I received that had questions/concerns about the project (although the majority of contact was very positive).

1) We had no interest in developing or reinforcing stereotypes of SAHFs.
Perhaps some of the questions might have seemed like they had that potential. However, the research questions being evaluated and the way the data will be analyzed and summarized have nothing to do with this.

2) There was no intention to try and describe ALL of the diverse responsibilities, complexity, rewards, and challenges associated with the SAHF experience. While this type of research is definitely needed, it wasn't the goal of the current project. I would like to initiate a more open-ended, question-based study that would get at this kind of thing. For example, here in Austin we are conducting a second study involving interviews with SAHFs that may approach evaluating some of this information.

3) The goals of the online study had nothing to do with sexual orientation and being a SAHF. We did ask one question about sexual orientation. This is
common in most psychology studies and simply used to describe the sample.
While there are SAHFs who are in relationships with men (about 1% of the current sample), looking at these differences or measuring sexuality was not a focus of the project. We did use some measures that measure masculinity norms that might (or might not) appear related to sexual orientation. These questions were just one small component of a larger measure that looks at adherence to a range of masculinity-based norms and attitudes.

WHAT WERE WE INTERESTED IN?

In short, there is a fairly substantial literature base showing that many couples frequently report a decline in relationship satisfaction and psychological health after having children. This project was interested in finding out how SAHFs are doing on these dimensions compared with other parents, AND what factors can predict how well these men are doing. Some of the variables we hypothesized to be related to these variables were social support, parenting self-efficacy (how well you feel you do at the tasks of being a parent), primacy of work (how important it was to your identity when working), adherence to traditional masculine norms and a few other variables.

Such data should add to the literature on parenting, fathering, and SAHFs.
More importantly, such we hope that these kinds of studies will be useful in developing interventions, informing men/parents, and helping counselors and community groups to help men effectively.

There are a few other descriptive things that we will be reporting, but that is most of it!

WHAT ARE THE NEXT STEPS?

1) I expect to have a brief summary of the findings that I will post/send to participants by April, 2007. This will include information on how SAHFs contrasted with other parents and the population and what variables ended up being related to or predicted psychological well-being and relationship satisfaction.

2) We will present these results at the annual conference of the American Psychological Association in August, 2007.

3) We will write up the results and submit a manuscript to the peer-reviewed journal, "The Psychology of Men and Masculinity." It's a very good journal and I've published many other articles there.

Thanks again for your participation and I hope this description is helpful in understanding all of the goals of the project!!!

All the best to you and your families. I do hope that you all will remain open to participating in further projects and for understanding the importance of contributing to this area of research.

Kindly,

Aaron Rochlen, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Counseling Psychology