Fatherhood Research & Practice Network

FRPN Webinar: Achieving High Response Rates and Dealing with Missing Data in Fatherhood Evaluations

On Tuesday, June 13 at 12:00 p.m. EST, the Fatherhood Research & Practice Network (FRPN) will host our eighth learning community webinar.

High rates of attrition reduce the credibility of research findings. Achieving High Response Rates and Dealing with Missing Data in Fatherhood Evaluations will focus on the fundamentals of maximizing response rates and practical approaches for handling missing data in fatherhood evaluation studies. It will feature staff from Mathematica Policy Research who conducted the Parents and Children Together (PACT) evaluation, a large-scale, multi-site project involving Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Marriage programs that included a 12-month follow-up survey, where the research team achieved a high response rate.

Webinar presenters will describe the various contact information and consents programs and researchers should collect at enrollment; effective ways of keeping in touch with respondents over time; statistical approaches to handling missing data; and how to interpret evaluation results considering different levels of missing data.

View all seven of the FRPN webinars here.

FRPN Grantee Spotlight

With estimates of nine million nonresident fathers in the U.S., and a rising trend in unmarried parenthood, studying nonresident and unmarried fathers is more important than ever. And so are efforts to help these fathers be positively involved in their children’s lives. In an effort to evaluate the overall effectiveness of these programs Drs. Erin Holmes, Alan Hawkins and Kevin Shafer, with Brigham Young University, are conducting a FRPN-funded meta-analytic study to examine evaluations of responsible fatherhood programs.

What do you hope to learn from the meta-analytic study?
A meta-analytic study collects all the research on a specific topic and combines data to get a bigger picture of what the combined research is telling us. In our meta-analytic study, we will try to answer two questions: 1) How effective are responsible fatherhood educational programs in increasing unmarried or non-resident fathers’ positive involvement in their children’s lives, positive co-parenting behavior and economic prospects? 2) What program factors impact the effects of these programs on fathers and families?

How can the fatherhood community support your work?
Some evaluations of responsible fatherhood programs have been published in typical academic sources. We know, however, that many evaluations are completed without being published in easy to find locations.

We need the community’s help in locating and collecting both published and unpublished evaluations. We are not attempting to examine any particular program, but rather to gather information for all responsible fatherhood programs that target nonresident and/or unmarried fathers. Studies can include those with control groups or just pre-post evaluations without a control group. When our meta-analytic study is completed, we will share the results widely with responsible fatherhood programs, practitioners and researchers.

If you know of an evaluation of a responsible fatherhood program that has been written up in a report, please contact us at fathereval@byu.edu.


Dr. Erin Holmes	Dr. Alan Hawkins	Dr. Kevin Shafer

Fatherhood Reentry Pilot Projects – Research Published

The Office of Family Assistance in the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, funded six Community-Centered Responsible Fatherhood Ex-Prisoner Reentry (“Fatherhood Reentry”) Pilot Projects to help returning fathers achieve their reentry, self-sufficiency and family reunification goals. From 2011 through 2015, Urban Institute researchers documented the implementation of these projects and the responsible parenting, healthy marriage and economic stability activities they provided to fathers and their families. These research publications describe their efforts.

FRPN Highlights

FRPN Co-Director Jay Fagan, PhD | Professor, Temple University School of Social Work

© 2017 Fatherhood Research & Practice Network. All rights reserved
The Fatherhood Research and Practice Network is supported by grant #90PR0006 from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The contents are solely the responsibility of the Fatherhood Research and Practice Network, Temple University and the Center for Policy Research and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, the Administration for Children and Families or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.