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The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between father's empathy ability and infant's social competence and to verify the mediating effect of family strength. For this purpose, a survey was conducted targeting 549 fathers of children attending a public daycare center in G-si, Gyeonggi-do. The collected data were subjected to reliability analysis, descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and hierarchical regression analysis using SPSS 23.0, and the Sobel Test was conducted to ensure the significance of mediation verification. First, the results of the study showed that there was a statistically significant correlation between the father's empathy ability and the infant's social competence, the empathy ability and family strength, and the infant's social competence and family strength. Second, family strength played a partial mediating role in the effect of father's empathy ability on infant's social competence. The results of this study are valuable in that they were able to reveal that the father's empathy ability and family strength are factors that affect the social competence of infants, and support is provided to improve fathers' parenting capabilities to increase the social competence of infants. It is significant that it suggests that a solution is needed.
Kang et al. (Sun,) studied this question.