Data Impact blog

Rebecca Goldman explores how the Fatherhood Institute champions ‘dad-data’ – from shaping data collection to analysis and knowledge mobilisation – to ensure fathers are visible in both research and decision-making.

The Fatherhood Institute is a small, registered charity that has worked since 1999 to build a society that values, prepares, and supports men as involved fathers and caregivers. We develop and deliver evidence-informed father-inclusion training, father-focused interventions and policy advocacy, as well as research and consultancy.

Involved fatherhood is transformative – not just for men, but for children, mothers and the whole of society – including reduction of gender work and care gaps.

How our ‘dad-data’ journey began

Because of the ‘mother focus’ of traditional ‘family’ policy and practice, we realised that research evidence would be crucial to persuade policymakers, employers and public services to include fathers in their family support offers. And so, we began putting together summaries of research findings to bring evidence about fathers to the attention of the media and stakeholders including practitioners.

Establishing a robust synthesised evidence base

From 2014 to 2024, the Nuffield Foundation funded us to carry out ‘Contemporary Fathers’, systematic-type research reviews to synthesise what was known from quantitative and qualitative research about UK fathers and to identify research gaps. The reviews included analyses of data from national cross-sectional statistical surveys (e.g. time use and employment) and large-scale longitudinal studies (e.g. fathers’ impacts on children). Most of these datasets are in the UK Data Archive.

The research studies included in these reviews are held in our digital searchable Library, which is updated with systematic bibliographic searches and currently holds 4,642 publications directly relevant to UK fathers.

Using our evidence base to achieve real-world impacts

With this synthesised evidence, we:

• created toolkits/practice guides for practitioners, and ‘factsheets’ for fathers and mothers
• responded to Government and Parliamentary consultations
• contributed to NICE guidelines
• included research findings in our training programme, campaigns and communications
• cited research evidence in ‘knowledge mobilisation’ conversations with the media, policymakers, employers, service-providers and practitioners.

We have also become ‘impact partners’ in academics’ research projects. One example is the PIECE project – an ESRC-funded analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study to investigate fathers’ impacts on children’s educational outcomes, carried out by the Universities of Leeds and Manchester, with Dr Jeremy Davies at the Fatherhood Institute as Co-Investigator. We:

• promoted the study to the media
• produced a briefing for teachers and early years educators and a guide for families
• wrote blogs for ParentKind and DadPad
• gave a public webinar with policy and practice discussion among sector organisations
• delivered another webinar to Department for Education government researchers.

We have also recently been placement supervisor for a Q-Step undergraduate’s analysis of the Labour Force Survey, which we hope will lead to a policy-focused project.

Our latest journey into the world of data collection

There is a well-established ‘dad gap’ in data collection and secondary analysis about children and families – see our blog for the National Centre for Research Methods.

Sometimes the terms ‘parent’ and ‘parenting’ are used to refer only to mothers and mothering, and data is collected from mothers but not fathers. Additionally, an aggregated ‘parent’ group of fathers and mothers is often not analysed by parental gender.

Often fathers who live separately from their dependent child/ren for all or most of the time are described as ‘absent’ or ‘non-resident’, with no data collected at all; even though the great majority of these ‘own household fathers’ (our preferred term) are part-time resident with their child/ren or otherwise involved in their lives.

We realised that in order to maximise policy and practice impacts, we had to get involved right at the beginning of the data impact pathway, influencing dataset providers and funders to collect data about, and directly from, a range of fathers including own household fathers.

There is a ‘feedback loop’: only if relevant and high quality ‘dad-data’ is collected at the outset, can it be analysed, included in research publications and syntheses, and influence policymakers, employers and public services.

We have become members of delivery teams (as Co-Investigators, Co-Leads and/or consultants) for new child cohort studies – Early Life Cohort feasibility study, EOPS Primary, and now Generation New Era – where we have had more input to research design, interview/survey questions and interviewer training than we could as ‘outsiders’.

Our ‘dad-data’ activities

In addition to becoming part of these child cohort study delivery teams, we:

1. Advocate

We advocate to the Office of National Statistics (ONS), universities, funding councils and government departments for the collection of ‘dad-data’ including identification of fathers in large-scale nationally representative surveys.

2. Contribute

We contribute expertise on how this data can be collected.  As examples, we were contributors to and cited in the ONS’s Inclusive Data Taskforce reports and 2021 Census consultations. Adding just one or two ‘parenthood’-identifying questions for men and women in a government survey can make a huge difference to the extent of ‘dad-data’.

3. Review

We carry out reviews of large-scale quantitative datasets to look at whether and how a range of fathers are identified in the data (including criteria for who is counted as living in a household); what and how ‘dad-data’ is collected (including question design and fieldwork instructions); and what data has been collected but not analysed.

We began with a look at sixteen large-scale longitudinal and cross-sectional datasets in the UK – ‘Where’s the Daddy‘ – and followed that with dataset reviews focused on the antenatal, postnatal and adolescence periods.

4. Collaborate

We carried out a scoping review of methodological literature on recruitment of own household fathers to child cohort studies, and a cognitive test of related survey questions, jointly with ScotCen, funded by the ESRC.

Selected outcomes

Our contribution to a ‘dad-data’ team effort (a collaboration between us, University College London, and Ipsos) in the Early Life Cohort feasibility study helped achieve an excellent father recruitment rate in the context of declining survey response rates. This study also yielded important learning for recruitment of own household fathers in the UK’s new birth cohort study, Generation New Era.

Our dataset reviews have been widely cited including in the IFS Deaton Review and a Children’s Commissioner report, and our methodological guidance has extended beyond the studies with which we are directly involved. We have influenced Understanding Society’s data collection on ‘parents living apart’; been substantially cited in a Growing Up in Ireland report on including ‘non-resident fathers’; and presented to a Scottish Parliament Shared Parenting group.

An unintended beneficial outcome has been conceptual work to re-frame so-called ‘non -resident fathers’ as sometimes part-time resident with their child/ren – together with a typology of subsets of fathers and father-figures. We and child cohort study teams now use an inclusive and positive term ‘own household father’ to describe fathers who do not live with their child/ren for all or most of the time.

Learning points for third sector organisations wishing to join the data collection arena

You – the third sector – have an important role in acting as advisors and making the case for survey questions and research recruitment in relation to ‘less-heard’ or ‘seldom-identified’ population groups.

While universities and other research organisations are experts in research design and the academic literature, you bring specialist ‘on-the-ground’ expertise about the specific population group. So, you should:

1. Be proactive

Be proactive and approach people, sometimes ‘cold’, as a way of initiating conversations and collaborations. You can attend free webinars about the datasets (provided by the ONS, the UK Data Service and longitudinal studies) and ask questions. You can respond to dataset consultations, and you can attend dataset consultation days and conferences to meet key people in-person.

2. Get involved at the start

Advocate for the ‘less-heard’ population group you represent by being part of the project from the start. Being an ‘add-on’ at a later stage reduces the chance of successful recruitment or question inclusions due to insufficient budgets and sometimes core design features, which are inappropriate for incorporating your population group.

3. Use your third sector skills

Act as an internal advocate in data-collection project teams. The decisions are not yours, but you can do your best to make a good case. It is helpful but not essential to have a researcher on your organisation’s team with experience of quantitative data collection and/or survey commissioning.

4. Be realistic

Recognise that competing priorities, pulls on the budget and time conflicts in the design and operation of surveys and longitudinal studies mean that not all of your recommendations can be taken on board. However you can make a difference!

Completing the ‘data-impact’ circle

Once the data has been collected, there is the opportunity to analyse it and influence policy and practice. In partnership with the University of Lincoln, we co-delivered a National Centre for Research Methods ‘dad-data’ training day to encourage doctoral students and early career researchers in secondary analysis of ‘dad-data’ in the UK Data Archive.

Exciting news is that the Early Life Cohort feasibility study dataset has recently entered the UK Data Archive, and includes rich data on fathers, fathering, father-baby bonding, and (for the first time in a UK birth cohort study) data from own household fathers. Some of this ‘dad-data’ has not been collected since the ALSPAC cohort of 1990s births.

Looking ahead

If you wish to:

• analyse ‘dad-data’ in the UK Data Archive, including the new Early Life Cohort feasibility data
• get help with how to collect ‘dad-data’ or recruit fathers in qualitative or quantitative research (including interviewer training)
• get help with impact and knowledge mobilisation activities
• use our Library

please email AdrienneBurgess@fatherhoodinstitute.org.

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