Abstract:

Father School was established by Duranno in October, 1995, in Seoul, Korea, in response to the growing national epidemic of abusive, ineffective and absentee fathers. Duranno Father School was founded on the premise that when the father stands firmly as the head of the household, society will also stand firm, thus creating a firm and healthy world. Since then, it has been held over 2,800 times at home and abroad, and there are about 180,000 program graduates around the globe.
This movement has been driven by volunteering graduates helping fathers to realize the importance of “father” and return to their noble position in the family. Father School aims to help men recover their identity as the father of the family and reunify the family through their role.
However, there’s not scientific and experimental research on the outcome; not only what kind of changes to the whole family has come from the program but also how it has influenced on the development and adjustment of family members. Researches on the effectiveness with academic approaches just started very recently.
The primary purpose of this study was to examine the influence of experiencing in Father School Program on family strength. This study includes participants in Father School Program as well as non-participants as comparative group. In the mean while, in order to search for long term efficacy of Father School Program, this research tracked the program graduates, divided them into two groups; fathers who attended in the program before 2009 and fathers who attended in it after 2009 and compared the dependent variables between them. Among 413 survey respondents, 283 fathers experienced in Father School Program and 130 fathers did not. The major dependent variables for this study were father’s psychological well-being; the subjective quality of life, self-esteem, the level of life satisfaction, marital relationship, parent-child relationship, time with family and family strength. Data was analyzed using the t-test with the SPSS program.
The research findings were as follows;
First, the comparison of the participating group in Father School Program and the non-participating group has found significant difference in marital relationship between two groups. The participating group in the Father School Program has reported higher score in terms of the quality of marital relationship.
Second, there were also significant differences in disciplinary difficulty and total scores on parent-child relationship between two groups; graduates before 2009 and graduates after 2009. Compared to fathers who attended in Father School Program after 2009, fathers who attended in Father School Program before 2009 felt less difficulty in disciplining their children and had better parent-child relationship in general.
Third, fathers’ self-esteem and conversation time with spouse were significantly different between fathers who served the activities related to Father School after experiencing in it and fathers who did not. Fathers’ higher level of self-esteem and more conversation time with spouses were associated with volunteer work for Father School.
This study helps Father School performance be assessed over the last 15 years in a scientific method. Based on the objective results, it provides valuable fundamental information in regards to further progression of the steps for Father School.

Keywords:

Experience of the Father School Program, Family Strength, Father’s psychological well-being.