Worker Attitudes and Behaviors Influencing Father Engagement: A National Cross Sectional Survey of Home Visitors

Background and Purpose:
Interest in father inclusion has spread in the human services, particularly within early home visiting services, a well-established and continually growing set of evidence based programs designed to engage families early in parenting (Duggan, 2004, Powell, 1993 and Wasik, 2001). Early efforts to engage fathers or explain the nature of fathers in services have started to frame some of the challenges and complications fathers face in home visiting (Korfmacher, 2008 & Roggman, 2002), however, this sector is diverse and offers many challenges to research and practice. While efforts by researchers in some model programs have improved their knowledge (Magill, 2006) universally the field struggles to keep the pulse of fathers and rates of involvement in services. This project will look at father involvement and engagement in home visiting programs and it will explore organizational and worker level factors that influence that involvement, including specific behaviors workers take to engage and involve fathers. This project looks at father engagement in home visiting programs, explores worker attitudes and behaviors toward fathers, and compares multiple home visiting models.

Methods:

The study gathered a cross-sectional sample of home visitors using a snowball sampling email strategy. The electronic survey provided insight into caseloads and father composition, worker and organizational strategies to work with fathers, other organizational factors that might influence worker attitudes and behaviors, and overall father engagement. Descriptive statistics were used to describe worker behaviors, worker attitudes, and father engagement levels, while Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is used to model those three relationships in one theoretical framework to identify early evidence of influence within the organizational context.

Results:
Nearly 900 respondents indicated father activities, involvement, or engagement in home visiting services after responding to the electronic survey. Respondents reported their attitudes towards fathers, specific engagement strategies, and the rates of fathers in their caseloads. Positive worker attitudes toward fathers were highly related to the behaviors they took to engage or work with fathers. Reports of worker behaviors helped define current strategies related to planning and reacting to fathers in services. Workers also reported general behaviors that helped illustrate variations in their practices between mothers and fathers. Home visiting models varied little on attitudes, behaviors, and overall father engagement, while program father initiatives were sometimes negatively related with father engagement in services.

Conclusions and Implications:
The study provided insight into influential worker attitudes and behaviors toward fathers and resulting father interactions in visits. Positive attitudes, many reported behaviors, and positive organizational contexts allude to a sector highly primed to work with fathers, but yet still a large proportion of families did not have a regularly active father in visits. The study illustrates areas in which future training, practice, or research might target, specifically surrounding attitudes and behaviors towards fathers, but more generally how workers frame the work they do in practice.