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Father Participation in Child Psychopathology Research

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Abstract

The purpose of the current study was two-fold: (1) To examine time trends of the inclusion of fathers in child psychopathology research from 2005 to 2015; and (2) to examine online crowdsourcing as a method to recruit and study fathers. In study 1, findings indicated that, relative to two earlier reviews of father participation from 1984 to 1991 and 1992–2004, there has been limited progress in the inclusion of fathers in child psychopathology research over the last decade. In study 2, without explicit efforts to recruit fathers, almost 40% of a sample of 564 parents recruited from online crowdsourcing (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) were fathers. Major demographic differences did not emerge between mother and father participants and data were equally reliable for mothers and fathers. Fathers were more likely to drop out over the course of a 12-month follow-up but these differences in retention between mothers and fathers were non-significant if fathers were retained at a 2-week follow-up. Finally, family process models tested across four assessments (baseline, 4, 8, and 12 month follow-ups) indicated that data from fathers are equally supportive of convergent validity as data from mothers. We concluded that online crowdsourcing is a promising recruitment methodology to increase father participation in child psychopathology research.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Child and Adolescent Psychology Training and Research, Inc. (CAPTR). The first author is supported NICHD grant F31HD082858 and the second author is supported by NIMH grant R01MH100377. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent he official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Vermont, 2 Colchester Ave., Burlington, VT, 05405, USA

    Justin Parent, Rex Forehand, Hayley Pomerantz & Virginia Peisch

  2. Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    Justin Parent

  3. Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, 05753, USA

    Martin Seehuus

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  1. Justin Parent
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Parent, J., Forehand, R., Pomerantz, H. et al. Father Participation in Child Psychopathology Research. J Abnorm Child Psychol 45, 1259–1270 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-016-0254-5

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