Introduction
Research Questions
- What are the overall impacts of fatherhood programs on parenting, healthy relationships with coparents, economic stability, and fathers’ well-being?
- What are the core components of fatherhood programs that are associated with larger impacts on parenting, healthy relationships with coparents, economic stability, and fathers’ well-being?
In 2022, the Administration for Children and Families launched a large-scale federal evaluation effort called Testing Identified Elements for Success in Fatherhood Programs (Fatherhood TIES) project with the hope of answering the question: What are the elements of fatherhood programs that lead to better outcomes for the fathers who take part in them?
The federal government invests about $150 million per year in Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood programs, the latter of which aim to help fathers strengthen relationships with their children, romantic partners, or coparents; enhance their parenting skills; and improve their economic stability. Existing evidence documents mixed effects of fatherhood programs that vary widely across different studies and are modest on average. For that reason, there is interest in identifying which features of fatherhood programs—or core components—are most strongly associated with success. Doing so can help practitioners identify how best to strengthen fatherhood programs so that they yield larger positive benefits for fathers and their families.
Fatherhood TIES will identify fatherhood program core components and then rigorously test the impacts of these core components on outcomes related to fathers’ parenting, healthy relationships with coparents, individual well-being, and economic stability. To accomplish the first part of this goal, the team conducted a core components meta-analysis that drew on technical reports and peer-reviewed journal articles describing fatherhood programs.
Purpose
This report summarizes findings from a meta-analysis that was conducted to identify core components of fatherhood programs. The meta-analysis results will inform the Fatherhood TIES study design, specifically which core components to test to determine whether they improve fathers’ outcomes. In addition, the meta-analysis results might be useful as targets for program-improvement efforts.
Key Findings and Highlights
- Overall, fatherhood programs had small and statistically significant positive impacts on outcomes related to parenting, healthy relationships with coparents, father well-being, and economic stability.
- For this same set of outcomes, programs that delivered content in individual formats—working with individual families, individual couples, or individual fathers—had larger impacts than programs offering only group-based services.
- Programs that included content focused on parenting knowledge and skills or the role of fathers and their responsibilities tended to have larger impacts on outcomes related to parenting, healthy relationships with coparents, and father well-being.
- Studies of programs that provided fathers with on-the-job training and job-related education or career guidance had larger impacts on fathers’ economic stability.
- Studies that reported implementation problems tended to have smaller impacts on economic stability outcomes than studies that did not report implementation problems.
- There were some contextual factors associated with variation in program impacts. For example, studies with more homogeneous samples in terms of race or ethnicity (regardless of the particular racial/ethnic group) tended to have larger impacts than studies with more heterogeneous groups.
- Randomized controlled trials tended to have smaller impacts than quasi-experimental designs on outcomes related to parenting knowledge and skills, father well-being, and healthy relationships with coparents, but had larger impacts than quasi-experimental designs on economic stability outcomes.
Methods
The research team used a rapid search strategy to identify eligible studies for the meta-analysis and identified 57 studies that were eligible for further coding and analysis. Members of the team then coded the following information for each study: (1) study and program characteristics and (2) effect sizes. Study and program characteristics included a range of theorized core components (for example, program content and program format) as well as contextual information about the study, such as the study design and the demographic composition of the sample. The team then used descriptive statistics to summarize characteristics about the studies and metaregressions to identify the features of the programs that were most strongly associated with positive impacts.
Citation
McCormick, Meghan, Sandra Wilson, and Allison Dymnicki. 2024. Identifying Core Components in Fatherhood Programs: A Meta-analytic Approach. OPRE Report 2024-09. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Glossary
- Core components:
- The parts, features, attributes, or characteristics of a program most strongly associated with its success.
- Meta-analysis:
- An approach that combines studies of multiple programs to determine the overall average impacts of programs of a certain type. It generally examines whole programs. Meta-analysis that moves beyond estimating average effects and focuses explicitly on program and study characteristics is one nonexperimental methodology researchers can use to determine whether there are measurable program components that are related to larger effects for study participants.