This research examines the general characteristics, acculturative stress, parenting efficacy, and involvement level of the fathers in multicultural families and investigates how each variable influences the fathers’ involvement in parenting. Family... This research examines the general characteristics, acculturative stress, parenting efficacy, and involvement level of the fathers in multicultural families and investigates how each variable influences the fathers’ involvement in parenting. Family, a composition of individuals gathered in one system, is in need of studies on each and every member. Nonetheless, previous research on multicultural families are mostly focused on the foreign female spouses. Also, research on multicultural families’ fathers are limited to the marital relationship and satisfaction, lacking studies on their involvement in parenting. Fathers of multicultural families’ involvement in parenting not only supplements the foreign mothers’ parenting limited due to poor Korean language proficiency, but positively influences the children’s development. This research includes multicultural families’ Korean father as an important member of the family, which had relatively little academic intention, and pursues a social welfare approach in the perspective that the father is a key rearer in rearing the children in multicultural families. This research explored the relationship among the variables of acculturative stress and parenting efficacy in involvement level of the Korean fathers of multicultural families. Accordingly, it reviews the fathers’ acculturative stress coming from the family and the society as well as parenting efficacy which is referred to as confidence in believing that they are good in parenting. This study targeted the Korean fathers of multicultural families with at least one child under the age of six, residing in the metropolitan area of Seoul. 107 survey responses were used for analysis. To analyze the data, SPSS 21.0 was utilized and frequency analysis, descriptive analysis, Cronbach’s α to measure statistical reliability, T-test and one-way ANOVA for general traits and regression to test the level of influence on the dependent variables. The findings are as follows: First, the average age of the fathers is 44.5, approximately 10 years older than the average age of the mothers. The highest level of education is mostly high school completion. Most of the fathers had office jobs or technical positions with average working hours of 30-50 hours per week, mostly earning about two to three million won. About mothers, most of them entered the country in 2011. It can be assumed that their marriage began upon their entry to Korea, considering their average of 6.9 years of marriage. The average age of the mothers is 34.4 and Korean language proficiency level evaluated by the Korean spouses were ‘fair’. Second, acculturative stress of the Korean fathers of multicultural families mostly come from a sense of discrimination derived from international marriage, followed by stress from multicultural acceptance and stress from delivering Korean culture. In terms of parenting efficacy, in the meantime, ability to raise children healthy showed the highest level, followed by communication competence, capacity to discipline, overall parenting capacity, and capacity to guide study. Considering the involvement level, activities together records the highest level, followed by child care and guidance and then guidance. Third, investigating the influence of acculturative stress and parenting efficacy, stress from delivering Korean culture included in acculturative stress and capacity to guide study included in parenting efficacy significantly influences involvement level. Lower the level of stress from delivering Korean culture and higher the parenting efficacy, the level of involvement increases. The theoretical and social welfare practice implications derived by the research is as follows: First, prior work on acculturative stress mostly focused on the people from the minority background who joined the majority society. This research, however, explored how acculturative stress of the Korean fathers of multicultural families influence involvement level. Since stress from delivering Korean culture is a significant factor influencing involvement level, it is indicated that programs that promote Korean culture to foreign mothers of multicultural families are needed. Moreover, if seminars educating the fathers to deliver Korean culture properly, their involvement level would be enhanced. Second, capacity to guide study included in parenting efficacy significantly influences involvement level. It is necessary to introduce programs that improve the fathers’ capacity to guide children’s studies, educating the fathers to apply educational ways of playing, to find informative books, and to intrigue the children’s curiosity. Last, considering the demographic traits of the fathers and involvement level, higher level of the mothers’ Korean language proficiency led to higher level of father’s involvement in parenting. Korean language courses with an emphasis on parenting children are expected to positively enhance the fathers’ level of involvement. Regardless of the findings, this research has limitations. The survey targeted only 107 multicultural fathers residing in the metropolitan area including Seoul and Gyeonggi, which makes it difficult to generalize for all the multicultural fathers in Korea. For future studies, it needs to target more people from all over the country with various ages for generalization. Moreover, future studies need to consider various factors on top of those included in this research. Systematic analysis with more possible variables would lead to a more comprehensive understanding on the influence factors of the fathers’ involvement level. Furthermore, both quantitative and qualitative studies on Korean fathers of multicultural families are limited. Going beyond the quantitative analysis on awareness and reality on involvement level of multicultural fathers, qualitative studies on the multicultural fathers’ stress and conflict with spouses are necessary in the future.
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