Recruiting Fathers for Parenting Research: An Evaluation of Eight Recruitment Methods and an Exploration of Fathers’ Motivations for Participation

Recruiting Perinatal Fathers to Interventions and Research: A Conceptual Model of Engagement and Integrative Review of Barriers Encountered and Strategies Used

“…Concrete barriers to paternal recruitment have been reported for issues such as transportation problems, the availability of remote/electronic participation, legal status requirements (e.g., immigration documented, biological father), hours the activity is available, and cost of or incentives for participating [28,52,58]. The idea that paternal engagement in perinatal activities is precluded by fathers' employment has been essentially debunked, as scheduling flexibility successfully overcomes this barrier [32].…”

“…The creation of father-specific "messaging" or advertising content impacts recruitment and includes planful decisions about content, delivery, and placement of those messages. Two quasiexperimental program evaluations demonstrated that paternal-specific content had a several-fold increase in successful paternal recruitment and engagement, relative to messages generically targeting parents [32,109]. Successful messages were reported to include: a) the father-specific vs. father-included nature of the activity, b) what dads will learn about and do, c) how the activity builds from fathers' existing knowledge and strengths, d) assurances that activities will be conducted well (i.e., culturally informed, ethically delivered, and providers have content expertise) and e) highlights the barrier reduction strategies available and benefits to family functioning and child development from participating [28,30,62,110].…”

“…Passive recruitment via the Internet (e.g., listservs, placed ads) and social media approaches are increasingly used to recruit fathers. When these approaches were evaluated, relative to other strategies, there were reportedly cost-and time-efficient [32]. Given the shifting nature of what media outlet is most widely used at any one time (e.g., TV or radio ads, MySpace, Craigslist posts, ads on Meta or Google), it is difficult to study whether one will consistently be the most successful for paternal recruitment [32].…”

“…The perinatal period may be an opportune time to engage fathers but paternal-focused interventions and research studies report that recruiting, engaging, and retaining fathers is a nearly universal challenge [27][28][29][30]. Currently, the paternal recruitment and engagement literature is comprised of a few program evaluations and quasi-experimental studies (e.g., [31,32]), descriptive reviews (e.g., [33,34]), distilled opinions, beliefs, and recommendations from qualitative studies of fathers and other stakeholders (e.g., [29,35,36]), and recommendations from expert working groups [37,38]. A protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis of paternal recruitment and engagement strategies was proposed [39]; but, this step only articulates a process for distilling key findings and lessons from a large number of studies.…”

“…The literature on recruiting, engaging, and retaining fathers likely is not yet adequately developed for those techniques. Yarmeych & Perskey [32] found that almost "no conclusive evidence" has surfaced regarding the most fruitful approaches to recruit fathers into interventions or research.…”