Critiquing Kazura's Study on Father–Child Attachment and Play

Introduction and Research Problem

As fathers have taken an increasing part in caring for and raising children — particularly since women have entered the workforce in large numbers — social research has increasingly focused on the role that fathers play in their children's early development. The prevailing view today is that shared parenting is the ideal arrangement, especially for mothers who are expected to act as both breadwinners and fully present, nurturing parents. Data suggest that although fathers often attempt to assume a nurturing role, working mothers typically remain the primary caretakers in the family.

The questions this study attempted to answer were the following: First, how do fathers and children form an attachment relationship in the first few years of life, and in what contexts, given that mothers remain responsible for most child-rearing tasks? Second, what obstacles — such as a lack of father role models, mothers acting as gatekeepers to paternal involvement, and fathers' own socialization and conditioning — prevent fathers from spending quality time with their children? This essay therefore also examines the father's level and quality of involvement with the child during the child's first two years of life, in order to determine the possible positive, negative, or neutral effects on the child's development.

The prelude to the research problem is more complex than necessary. In essence, the entire problem can be reduced to the single statement that the study intends to evaluate the father's qualitative impact on the child during the child's early years. Instead, the introduction states its point in a more convoluted manner than required.

Literature Review and Study Purpose

The literature review is also unnecessarily long and convoluted. It would have been more effective to state succinctly that fathers are motivated to care for their children but that several obstacles — not of their choosing, such as socialization and mothers acting as gatekeepers — may prevent them from fulfilling their caregiving expectations.

The authors' conclusion to the literature review, titled "Purpose of Study," adequately summarizes the preamble, but introduces an additional study objective that was absent from the introduction. In the "Purpose of Study" section (p. 40), the authors also mention their intention to "examine the amount of time fathers spend with their children," in addition to addressing the qualitative nature of parent–child relationships. The implied contributions of this research are that fathers will improve their attachment to their children and enhance their role as affective caregivers within the family. The research question, purpose, and hypothesis could all have been communicated more clearly and concisely.

There appear to be no clearly stated hypotheses in this study. The study seems to take it as a given that fathers are impeded by obstacles beyond their control in adequately caring for the child as a nurturing attachment figure. Kazura (2000) implies that he accepts this perspective, and the study then sets out to test this assumption. If this constitutes the hypothesis — which it appears to — it is formulated in a unidirectional manner and functions as an implicit research hypothesis.

Strengths and Limitations of the Study

The most significant limitations involve the sample. The sample appears skewed: the average age of participants was early middle age (mothers, 31.95 years; fathers, 35.54 years), drawn from a middle-class, predominantly Caucasian population, with only two adopted children included. Studying fathering styles is a complex undertaking, and to reflect that complexity adequately, a more diverse population should have been selected — one that spans a wider range of paternal ages and includes families from a greater variety of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds.

It is likely that the study was deliberately confined in this way to limit the penetration of confounding factors. Nonetheless, the parameters of the sample itself introduce bias: fathers who are early middle-aged and come from a relatively comfortable socioeconomic environment may be better positioned to devote time and attention to their children than fathers who are older, younger, or from less advantaged backgrounds. To address its broad and complex research question adequately, the methodology would need to include fathers from across the demographic spectrum and from diverse cultural contexts. Although this is realistically difficult to achieve, the researcher might have employed a cross-sectional methodology, or a combination of longitudinal and cross-sectional approaches, in which families from diverse backgrounds are observed over time.

Furthermore, the sample size is too small. Twenty-seven fathers and twenty-seven mothers are insufficient to support the conclusions drawn in this study.

Additional information about the principal investigator would also have been valuable — specifically, his or her level of objectivity and any potential confounding factors introduced through the interview process. In what is known as the researcher effect, the personality and culture of interviewers — along with other characteristics such as demeanor, accent, gender, and age — can influence the interview dynamic (Breakwell, Hammond, & Fife-Schaw, 2000). The interviewer's ethnic background may have subjectively influenced structured interviews conducted with the two African-American families and the one South Asian family, given that people tend to disclose more to interviewers they perceive as similar to themselves (Fowler, 2009). Survey instruments must be carefully designed to screen out potentially biased or racially charged questions that may be misunderstood by either party (Fowler, 2009). No examples of specific questions from the Parent-Child Caregiving Questionnaire are provided, and the researcher may have unintentionally introduced disruptive elements into the interview. This subjectivity was somewhat reduced by the use of videotapes to record social interactions and the fact that these tapes were coded independently; however, this raises further questions about the objectivity of the two coders who assessed the videotapes.

Kazura (2000) adopted the Strange Situation procedure for observing child behavior in the presence of either parent. The Strange Situation procedure is widely respected in developmental psychology research. However, subjectivity may enter through the fact that a child's behavior during the procedure may be influenced by factors unrelated to parental attachment — for instance, the child may be moody, hungry, or simply more accepting of one parent at a given moment for reasons unrelated to the quality of that relationship. More broadly, so many confounding factors affect the study that it is difficult to see how reliable conclusions can be drawn, particularly given the small and limited sample. One such factor is the possibility of a father physically or sexually abusing his child: the child may appear distressed in the father's presence, and an observer unaware of the abuse might attribute that distress to one of the listed impediments to paternal attachment. It is therefore difficult to distinguish whether observed attachment difficulties are attributable to external impediments — and if so, which — or whether there is a more direct explanation for the child's discomfort.

To the author's credit, he does note that "strong conclusions based on this study alone are not warranted due to the small size and exploratory nature of the investigation" (p. 9).

The interpretations are consistent with the results, and if the observers who assessed the data were objective, the instruments used are reliable, and the data were analyzed using appropriate and scientifically accepted statistical methods — specifically, t-tests followed by ANCOVAs for some variables.

The practical implications of the research include the observation that children may benefit from increased play interaction with fathers, as fathers' more directive and goal-oriented play style appears to encourage greater toy exploration. The author infers this from the observation that children's play level increased while interacting with their fathers. While this rationale may be valid, other plausible explanations exist — for instance, children may respond to the novelty of receiving attention from their father, or a masculine presence may in itself elicit a heightened response. Kazura's (2000) observation may be valid, but the conclusion that "fathers engaged their children in higher levels of pretend play than mothers" risks being a generalization, particularly given that imagination and creativity are highly individual traits and the sample is small — a limitation Kazura himself acknowledges.

Conclusion

The study employed a within-subjects methodology in which all subjects were presented with the same consecutive conditions. The methodology seems justifiable and, aside from the problems associated with the skewed and small sample, the study possesses a certain element of validity. The differences between fathers' and mothers' social interaction with their children are notable, though many of the study's broader conclusions are difficult to generalize from so limited a sample.

In conclusion, a larger sample comprised of greater diversity in parental age, cultural background, and socioeconomic background might have produced different and more generalizable results. Future research in this area would benefit from a more representative and methodologically rigorous design.

References

Breakwell, G. M., Hammond, S., & Fife-Schaw, C. (2000). Research methods in psychology. London: Sage.

Fowler, F. G. (2009). Survey research methods. Los Angeles: Sage.

Kazura, K. (2000). Fathers' qualitative and quantitative involvement: An investigation of attachment, play, and social interaction. Journal of Men's Studies, 9, 1–13.