Researching fathers through surveys: methodological challenges

Large international surveys have been used to investigate relevant topics, including family life, gender roles and care. Such topics are addressed with ad hoc scales and variables, covering many countries, thus allowing useful comparisons. However, in researching fathers, qualitative methods (narrative and biographic) have largely been used because they allow a deeper investigation of actions and motivations but also due to a lack of detailed questions on fatherhood or small numbers of items in large-scale surveys. This chapter starts from a question on why and how to investigate fathers from a quantitative perspective, using existing large and sophisticated surveys proving a big amount of interesting data (without costs) that, however, are not built to merely investigate fatherhood. The aim of this chapter is to provide an analysis of how existing large data sets - not specifically focused on fathers –can nevertheless be used by scholars to learn more about fathers and fathering: a brief overview of the topic, scales and aspects of fatherhood and gender roles will be discussed in three relevant surveys (the European Values Study, the Generations & Gender Programme, and International Social Survey Programme) providing critical methodological considerations regarding researching fathers.