Fathers forgotten again

 The Growing Up in New Zealand Study continues to frustrate me. Just released is their Now We Are Eight report. Yet again there is bugger all information about the fathers of these children.

The word 'father' appears 3 times in the 172 page report, ironically the last time in the appendix describing the study's "overarching research questions" which include, "How involved are fathers in children’s lives, and what are their influences over time on children’s development?"

The word 'mother' appears 468 times.

'Partner' crops up 18 times, the context of which relates only to

- partner conflict

- study methodology

Data relating to single or two parent households is inconclusive.

In the extracted chart 'parent alone' makes up a smallish percentage for each ethnicity, but the grey and green portions could contain either a single or two parent family. And the 'two parent' portion doesn't necessarily indicate two biological parents.

But that's all there is.

According to the Census 2018 (conducted around the same time as the Now We Are Eight report was compiled):

Twenty eight percent of families with children are one parent.

Next, in the past, the GUiNZ collection waves have included information about sources of income including benefits. Not this time.

Perhaps this is due to the Auckland University of Technology previously pointing out:

"A weakness of the GUiNZ data is that it may not be population representative and is not linked to administrative data.... Overall, 95% of GUiNZ children are born to mothers who are partnered. The GUiNZ sample seems to have low sole-parent status compared to a 2009 study that found one-third of families with dependent children were headed by sole-parents (Ministry of Social Development, 2010). This could be because being partnered in the GUiNZ data is not the same as their domestic-purposes benefit status, from which partnership status is inferred by other studies. We find that 70% of those who say they receive the domestic-purposes benefit also answer yes to the question of whether they have a partner – confirming that the sole-parent status derived from GUiNZ is essentially different to those studies which rely on benefit status to infer partnership status." 

Perhaps the GUiNZ survey designers do not want to 'compromise' the authenticity of reponses by including questions about benefits.

The media discussion created by the release of Now We Are Eight has been all about how the 8 year-olds responded to questions about gender identification.

More important than fathers, and whether or not they have one.