Involving Students in Participatory Research on Fatherhood: A Case Study

The pedagogical method reported here has three purposes: (a) to engage the students in an interaction with the literature so that they can relate the issues to their own communities, (b) to include in the class discussion a consideration of the research methods reported in the literature, and (c) to take some of the fear and mystery out of the idea of research by involving a group in a shared research experience. Findings from a class project using questionnaire data (n = 75) about attitudes and reported behaviors of rural fathers from five life stages are reported. The findings confirm the existence of new attitudes toward fatherhood but find little change in fathering behavior. This article intends to share with family life educators a pedagogical approach in which students developed a heightened interest in the research literature forming the context of the reading for their course in fatherhood. Students developed skills in critical thinking and extended into their own communities an inquiry concerning issues raised in their reading of the course text and research articles. The approach of involving students as part of a research team, with the instructor as team leader, could be used in many family science courses. The participatory method reported here counteracted a frequent tendency of passive reading and attitudes of remoteness toward research materials. The class described in this report was an upper class/graduate level summer school course, Current Issues in Contemporary Fatherhood, with 15 members, most of whom were high school teachers and human service professionals in rural communities. The following paragraph (Kennedy, in press) in the course syllabus set the stage for the project: