Abstract (eng)
The present work deals with the impact of marital quality from the father’s perspective and maternal gatekeeping on the father-child attachment of infants. The aim was to show how aspects of marital quality (marital satisfaction, conflict resolution) on the one hand may affect father-child attachment as well as maternal gatekeeping. The influence of different dimensions of maternal gatekeeping on father-child attachment will be shown. An important part of this thesis deals with the question whether maternal gatekeeping possibly plays a moderating role between the aspects of the marital quality and the father-child attachment.
The data for the present thesis were collected as part of the project V of the “CENOF Study”, the sample consists of a total of 84 families from Vienna and Lower Austria. To grasp the father-child attachment the Attachment Q-Sort by Waters (1995) was used in the German translation of Ahnert, Eckstein-Madry, Supper, Bohlen & Suess (2012). The measurement of the aspects of marital quality of the father was performed by the Relationship Assessment Scale of Hendrik (1988) and the Marital Satisfaction Inventory -Revised (Klann, Hahlweg, Limbird, & Snyder, 2008). To detect maternal gatekeeping, a separate questionnaire for CENOF study was created, this consists of the 3 dimensions of gatekeeping by Allen & Hawkins (1999) and a gatekeeping dimension by Fagan and Barnett (2003).
The results showed correlations between the aspects of the partnership quality, relationship
satisfaction and conflict resolution, to individual father-child attachment components. Furthermore, relationships between the dimensions of maternal gatekeeping and father-child attachment components are found. The influence of aspects of marital quality on maternal gatekeeping could be confirmed in this study. Regarding possible interactions between the aspects of
marital quality and maternal gatekeeping on father-child attachment, it was found, that individual
dimensions of maternal gatekeeping play a moderating role between the aspects of marital
quality and father-child attachment components.