New reports call for research to better include fathers
In two new reports, the Fatherhood Institute is pressing the UK’s research funding bodies, researchers, and government to reevaluate their approach to collecting and using data concerning families. The institute emphasises the need of ensuring that research comprehensively captures crucial information about fathers and their influences.
In the reports funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the Fatherhood Institute sheds light on both opportunities and shortcomings in the collection and analysis of evidence regarding UK fathers and their adolescent children. Despite the wealth of father-related data available in UK longitudinal studies, the reports reveal that research shaping public policy often neglects fathers, despite their significant presence and impact on children’s lives.
Opportunities highlighted in the reports include:
– Analysis of the most recent data about fathers during children’s adolescence, derived from studies such as Growing Up in Scotland, the Millennium Cohort Study, and Understanding Society.
– Incorporation of existing data on father-child relationships, as well as fathers’ characteristics, attitudes, and parenting behaviours, when studying critical topics like adolescent educational outcomes, mental health, and the impacts of parental separation.
– Utilisation of upcoming datasets like the Early Life Cohort and the Department of Education’s new child cohort studies, designed to collect more extensive data about fathers, including those living separately.
Challenges identified in the reports include:
– Major studies tracking children and families over time often fail to gather sufficient data from and about fathers, particularly when they do not reside with their children full-time.
– The absence of a standardised set of definitions for fathers and father-figures in official statistics about children and families.
– Researchers using ‘parents’ to describe studies and analyses that focus solely on mothers.
– Labelling fathers living separately as ‘absent’ or ‘non-resident,’ despite a high proportion of them being actively involved in their children’s lives.
– Insufficient budgets to support effective fieldwork engagement with more than one parent, within and across households.
The first report highlights research gaps and recommendations, while the second takes a comprehensive look into six UK longitudinal studies, proposing opportunities for more father-inclusive research. This detailed resource is aimed at longitudinal studies, their funders, and researchers conducting secondary analyses of these datasets. It outlines the father data collected in each study, suggests improvements to study design for enhanced father data, and identifies opportunities for future analysis. Valuable across various research fields, including adolescent and youth studies, child development, family studies, education, public health, biosocial research, and social mobility/economic studies.
The six longitudinal datasets reviewed are: the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), the first Growing Up in Scotland birth cohort study (GUS), the first and second Longitudinal Survey of Young People in England (LSYPE) studies (Next Steps and Our Future), and Understanding Society (the UK Household Longitudinal Study).
