Influence of mother's depression on her reports of father involvement and child behavioral problems: a latent state-trait approach.

Research on father involvement has shown positive effects on child development. Because fathers in high social risk samples may be hard to recruit or retain in studies, the literature often has relied on maternal report of father involvement. A major limitation of this approach is that unobserved traits of the reporting mothers may distort the real associations between father involvement and children's development. Using maternal data from a large, longitudinal sample (N = 704) of low-income, young mothers, we evaluated the degree to which a stable depressive trait affected the link between mother-reported measures of father involvement and child problems. Three waves of maternal depression data were used to fit a latent state-trait model of depression, allowing for separate estimates of occasion-specific symptoms and stable depressive trait. A latent regression analysis which did not control for this trait revealed a link between father involvement and child problems similar in magnitude to the links reported in the literature. However, this association disappeared once we accounted for the effect of maternal depressive trait. Results suggest that studies using maternal reports of both father and child behaviors should control for such confounding effects. We elaborate on these findings in the conclusion and offer suggestions for future research on the role of fathers in child development.