Poster Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Wellbeing, Meaning And Time Spent With Children: The Case Of Part-Time Working Fathers (#716)

Eric Mercier 1
  1. University of Melbourne, Master of Applied Positive Psychology, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

There is a need for researchers to investigate the wellbeing of an under-researched group, part-time working fathers, as there is current a gap in the literature on this population. There is abundant literature on fatherhood, masculinity, fathers’ involvement in family/children life, impact of fathers’ involvement with their children. However, there is no specific literature on part-time working fathers’ wellbeing in relation to time spent with children. It is suggested that a research should compare part-time working fathers to full-time working fathers and explore the correlation between wellbeing (supported by Ryff’s Psychological Wellbeing Scale or the PERMA Profiler), meaning, time spent with children and family to work enrichment, supported by the Work-Family Enrichment scale. It is suggested that a longitudinal mixed methods study be implemented, including two concurrent quantitative questionnaires and one qualitative survey to participants at one-month intervals. It is expected that the research will find positive correlations between the variables for part-time working fathers, help stimulate the literature, promote/raise awareness of the need for fathers to catch up to mothers regarding part-time work and create more debate about the obsolescence of the father-as-primary-breadwinner model, which is still currently the prevalent model around the world.