Exposure to Islamic Family Content and Psychological Resilience Among Fatherless Women in Indonesia: Evidence from Instagram Followers of @Fatherman

Abstract

The rapid growth of Islamic family content on Indonesian social media has created a new mediated space through which women who grew up without an active father figure (fatherless) encounter narratives about family, faith, and emotional recovery. Grounded in the Communication Theory of Resilience, Family Resilience Theory, Media Ecology Theory, and Meaning-Making Theory, this study examined the direct relationship between exposure to Islamic family content on the Instagram account @Fatherman and psychological resilience among self-identified fatherless women, and tested whether this relationship differs by age, marital status, type of fatherless experience (physical versus psychological absence), and daily Instagram use duration. A cross-sectional survey using a ten-item content-exposure scale and a seventeen-item resilience scale (five-point Likert format) was administered online as the first, instrument-testing phase of a larger explanatory-sequential mixed-methods dissertation project; the present analysis reports results from the thirty-four respondents (women, 205-217 years) who completed the instrument during this initial phase, ahead of the study's planned full-scale quota sample of 384 respondents. Both scales showed strong internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = .93 for exposure, .89 for resilience). Simple linear regression showed that exposure to Islamic family content significantly and positively predicted resilience, b = 0.42, t(32) = 3.16, p = .003, explaining approximately 23.8% of the variance (R² = .238). Independent-samples t-tests found no significant resilience differences by marital status or fatherless type, while one-way ANOVA found no significant resilience differences across age groups or Instagram-use-duration categories, although exposure itself varied significantly by age group, F(3,30) = 4.38, p = .011. The findings offer preliminary empirical support for treating Islamic family-oriented social media content as a communicative resource for resilience-building among fatherless women, while underscoring the need for confirmation in the study's forthcoming larger sample.