Father Involvement in Early Home Visiting Services and Organizational Factors Influencing That Involvement

Background and Purpose:

Fathers have not traditionally been the focus of parent or family human service programs, however growing evidence linking fathers with child and family outcomes have spawned a growing interest in the capacity to serve and impact fathers in existing or similar service settings.  Early home visitation programs are one such human service sector, traditionally targeting mothers and their children, but under increasing scrutiny to understand their potential to engage and involve fathers. As fathers are a relatively new and growing target of services, little is known about their actual participation rates in home visiting services, the nature of that participation, what factors promote or hinder their participation, and how these rates vary across established evidence based models. This project examines father involvement in home visiting programs, and explores organizational and worker level factors that may influence that involvement.

Methods:

This study surveyed a nationwide cross sectional group of home visiting personnel, sampled from publicly available contact lists within popular evidence based home visiting models. An electronic survey was seeded to approximately 3,200 home visiting personnel throughout the nation using snowball survey techniques. The survey includes questions on organizational structure and culture, worker level factors such as backgrounds/experience, worker behaviors, and worker attitudes, and organizational culture questions targeted toward the home visiting model or curriculum implemented. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is used to evaluate relationships between organizational and worker factors and outcomes such as father involvement.  

Results:

Well over 1,400 responses were received, with 900 surveys in the final, cleaned sample. The snowball sampling strategy netted nearly 1,800 additional contacts or forwarded messages. Home visiting personnel, on average, reported that about 60% of their caseload families had a father or father figure involved in a caregiving role, and that about a third of their caseloads had a father who had recently been involved in a home visit. Workers also reported that father involvement was overwhelmingly positive when fathers were present, and that proximity to the family (residential status) and biological relationship to the child increased the likelihood of involvement. Preliminary analysis showed a complex relationship between worker backgrounds and attitudes and some variation across home visiting models. Organizational structural and cultural factors also played a role in father involvement and an indirect effect on worker attitudes and behaviors.

Conclusions and Implications:

The study provides a snapshot of the current level and quality of father involvement in early home visitation, and attempts to explain that involvement through an organizational lens. There exists a significant population of fathers who are engaged in home visiting services, and home visitors are able to identify and serve those fathers in services across home visiting model and curriculum type. Early analysis suggests that future involvement research may benefit from collecting organizational and worker level indicators such as organizational culture and structural factors as well as worker backgrounds and attitudes on fathers.