The Role of Fathers: How Implicit and Explicit Messages about Parenting in Slovak Media and Legislation Relate to Lay Attitudes and Argumentation

The aim of this paper is to outline how focus group participants´ accounts and representative national quantitative survey results about reproduction and parenting interact with media and legislation texts around these topics through the discourses they draw from. We collected 1) all relevant articles in the last 10 years (2002-2011) in the most important Slovak mainstream broadsheet daily (N=1500), 2) all relevant articles in the most important Catholic broadsheet (N=132) for the last year (10/2010-9/2011), as well as 3) all relevant laws currently in force and looked for the main messages about parenting. To explore attitudes and argumentations of lay people (parents, future parents, as well as child-free persons) about reproduction and parenting we organized 15 semi-structured focus group discussions with young men (N=48) and women (N=39), aged 20-34. Seven groups were all male, four all female and four were mixed, with participants from various socio-economic backgrounds and varying levels of education. The discussions were analyzed using qualitative thematic analysis and basic critical discursive analysis. Findings from media and legislation text analysis correspond with the FG participants´ accounts especially concerning the limited role of fathers and negative stereotypes about fatherhood.