Although the majority of African American children have had their biological father absent from the home, very little is known about nonresident fatherhood among African Americans. This project extends knowledge of nonresident fatherhood to African American nonresident fathers, providing an important basis for policy decisions regarding father involvement and demonstrating how fathers can contribute to their children's well-being. Previous research presents a skewed picture of African American nonresident fathers. Past studies based on large national surveys provide only superficial treatment of racial and ethnic differences, and small-scale studies of African Americans are limited to young, poor, and unmarried men. This study expands our current knowledge by combining an ecological perspective (McAdoo 1993), which emphasizes the unique socioeconomic and cultural context of African American family life, with a multidimensional paternal resource framework comprised of nonresident fathers' human, financial, and social capital (Amato 1998). Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we document lifetime patterns of paternal involvement among African American and White nonresident fathers, focusing on both the quantity and quality of involvement. We examine four sets of theoretical explanations for father involvement among African American men, including the circumstances surrounding the birth of the child, men's changing economic fortunes, men's subsequent family building activities, and socio-cultural support for fathering. Then, we investigate how involvement with nonresident fathers affects the well-being of African American children relative to Whites. Based on the """"""""attenuation hypothesis"""""""" (McLoyd et al. 2000), we test whether children's embeddedness in extended family networks, poverty status, and welfare moderate the effect of father involvement on African American children. A continued lack of knowledge of the determinants and implications of paternal involvement among African Americans is problematic given the prominence of nonresident fatherhood in African American family life.
