Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic is the biggest global crisis of an era, rewriting norms and expectations woven into the social fabric of everyday life. Perhaps unsurprisingly, questions about the differential economic, social, and relational impacts of this crisis have preoccupied social science researchers, policymakers, and service providers across the globe in 2020. The pandemic, and various forms of lockdown imposed in most majority and minority world contexts, has dramatically altered our lives, albeit in different ways. Like other times of crisis, such as the 2008– 12 global economic recession, these unfolding dimensions of rupture and change preoccupy socio-historical researchers now and will do so long into the future.

Social scientists have a unique and imperative role in advancing knowledge of the unfolding impacts of COVID-19 including how these new social conditions are affecting people's lives, needs, attitudes, and behaviours. Yet the changes wrought by the crisis have also simultaneously altered the conduct of social sciences research, placing new restrictions on how new knowledge may be produced. In this chapter, we consider how the re-use of qualitative data and its preservation has become especially pertinent as part of an important repertoire of research methods. Our position entails a more nuanced ethical sensibility towards the archiving and reuse of existing research data in the context of capturing the evolving and uneven impacts of crises and understanding the social contexts from which they emerge. We therefore argue for, and raise awareness of, the tremendous value and potential for qualitative data re-use via the associated methodology of qualitative secondary analysis (or QSA) and make a case for data preservation and archiving.

We are prompted to write this chapter because, while there has been significant innovation in methods of qualitative data re-use and QSA over the past two decades, these have not traditionally been considered as part of the ‘go to’ methodological repertoire for qualitative, in-depth engagement (for example, interviews, participatory methods). In the early stages of the national lockdown, there was a proliferation of work newly engaging with the various potentials of digital research methods and resources for research.

Other members of the community centre took part in the walking photovoice, including Jed and Bill, young mum Jodie and her friend Leanne (see Chapter 7). Given the nature of the methods used, demographic data was not generated for these participants.

This final empirical chapter focuses on the experiences of men residing in a low-income locality in the city where the MPLC study was conducted. It reports on the ethnographic methods employed at a community centre based in an area of deprivation in the city. The centre was described as an important site of care and connectedness by the professionals who supported recruitment of participants to the study (see Chapter 4) and this was also confirmed by the men themselves. Ethnographic approaches have proven to be an effective means for identifying, engaging with and foregrounding the voices of ostensibly ‘hard-to-reach’ populations, including low-income families (Hemmerman, 2010) and disadvantaged and economically deprived fathers (Wissö, 2018). Indeed, despite policy and public alarmism about the pervasiveness of ‘dad deprivation’ (Ashe, 2014) and ‘men deserts’ in low-income localities across Britain, the centre was a space where the presence of men was observed, including visibly as fathers.

In accessing some of the more marginalised men in the city it was possible to observe how and why being a father or carer remains an important identity for men even when access to children may have been compromised or lost. The limits to men's family lives and relationships are also considered via the lens of their local engagement, social networks and community participation. With a proactive agenda towards supporting community members with their mental health, the community centre therefore became a key site for uncovering the lived experiences of diverse fathering in low-income contexts. As Bonner-Thompson and McDowell (2020) note, care itself has become much more precarious under the conditions of austerity, yet it has also enabled new and alternative spaces and practices of care to emerge (Power and Hall, 2017). As a locality-based policy and practice intervention creating opportunities for collective participation, the community centre was a key exemplar of this in the study.

The findings presented are further illustrative of the deprivations of context that shape men's identities and trajectories. This space was especially valuable to the older men, for whom connections to family had become more tenuous over time and were more transitory. I argue that knowledge of the locality and community-based resources is integral to an understanding of this group of participants and for the development of a rich, multi-layered understanding of the contexts shaping men's family participation in low-income contexts over time.

A significant context in which men in low-income families negotiate their identities as ‘present’ fathers is in encounters with health and social care services. It is in these contexts that family tensions and disputes in relation to men's roles, responsibilities and rights in connection with their children coalesce, are supported, refuted and sometimes denied (Tarrant and Hughes, 2019). In the first of the empirical chapters of the book, accounts are presented of men's family participation and complex needs as observed by local welfare providers and professionals in the city where the MPLC study was conducted. These accounts render visible the local and national practice and policy contexts contouring men's participation in low-income families and localities and develop an understanding of the (inter)dependencies of men with local services and providers. The findings confirm that marginalised men are most visible to services when they are seeking to secure resources on behalf of their families or in relation to the individual troubles they may experience, such as material deprivation, problems securing employment and/or physical and mental health problems.

The analyses presented in this chapter are interpretations of data generated from informal ethnographic conversations, semi-structured interviews and a knowledge-exchange workshop held with several professionals to share early findings from the secondary analysis work that was conducted using existing data about low-income men (see Chapter 1 and Appendix 2). The professionals who agreed to participate were at the coal-face of changing family patterns and had an accumulated wealth of knowledge about the problems men encounter in their personal and family lives. The findings illustrate the importance of local networks of formal support for families living in hardship, as well as how professionals interpret and respond to men's experiences of marginalisation and disadvantage. Notably, it was service providers working for third sector and voluntary agencies who demonstrated a keen awareness and understanding of the complex needs and experiences of marginalised men and their families in the city. They also interpreted the experiences of the men with whom they were engaging within the policy frameworks and discourses that framed them. The contextual features they describe offer an additional layer of understanding about the local processes and contexts that variously impact on men's family participation and that work to sustain or mitigate against it.

When Theo, age 39, made this point in his interview for the MLPC study, he was providing informal kinship care to his niece, great-niece (aged 16 and 1) and nephews (aged 19, 8 and 5) following the death of his sister at the age of 32, and of his father 16 months prior to that. He had left employment to provide care for his two youngest nephews, one of whom has suspected learning difficulties, and was living for five days a week in his sister's rented accommodation. The five children mentioned here did not include his son, aged 12, and stepson, aged 2, whom he saw only at irregular weekends when he was able. While a decision was being determined by social services about whether he would obtain a care order for his two youngest nephews, he was paying for this house out of his now depleted life savings and with some money borrowed from his mother. His mother, aged 61, has Crohn's disease and was incapable of providing care for the children. When he did spend weekends with his partner, son and stepson he had to rely on his eldest nephew and niece to look after the two youngest children. He explained that he felt like he was being forced by social services into securing a Special Guardianship Order because, in his view and in the longer term, this was cheaper for the local authority. While all this was happening (over the school summer holidays) he had just £3.26 a day to support all five children, not including his own.

Theo's quote has been used to open this chapter because it so effectively illustrates the key themes explored both in the research and this book. It demonstrates, albeit in one of the more extreme of situations, how both financial and emotional pressures infuse the process of decision making around appropriate and necessary caring arrangements to keep children in families. Theo's family participation was contingent on his being the most resourced and capable person in his family to support these children and because he was regarded as the best-placed family member to ensure that the two younger children remained in the family.

This chapter is the first of three that present analyses of men's accounts of their family participation and care trajectories. It explores the questions of how and in which ways men participate in their families in low-income contexts and foregrounds their diverse caring arrangements and family configurations and trajectories. An in-depth examination is presented of the diverse and divergent sets of caring arrangements described by men in different generational positions, drawing on empirical examples across the cases. The findings in this chapter demonstrate how caring arrangements in low-income families are both negotiated and contested over time. This includes across familial generations, between men and women and often in engagements with services and agencies external to families. Attention to these caring arrangements reveals how gendered and classed inequalities are reproduced within family practices, personal relationships and intergenerationally, sometimes requiring men to reassert their right to their families.

The dynamic processes and family trajectories of both the participants and their family members, which determined how the men's caring arrangements came to be, are also explored. Such processes are revealing of the social and relational character of men's caring arrangements in low-income contexts and of the circumstances and personal biographies that required these men to respond to and meet the support needs of their younger family members. Consideration of how the participants narrate their care responsibilities, caring masculinities and the family structures that produce them renders visible the diverse, relational pathways that characterise men's family participation in low-income family contexts across the lifecourse.

The vulnerable family contexts and caregiving arrangements that men manage and negotiate in low-income families also foreground often ignored forms of socially marginalised fatherhoods. These also happen to be fatherhoods that occur in contexts where men's ability to balance their earning capacities with family care are perhaps most subject to compromise or challenge (see O’Brien, 2011). Here, the often hidden and untapped potential of men's family participation in low-income contexts gains precedence.

Diverse caring arrangements

Reflecting the complexity and diversity of contemporary family forms and biographies, MPLC uncovered a varied set of caring arrangements and family configurations. Many of the family configurations described by the participants have been conceptualised as being those most likely to increase vulnerability to poverty (for example, Kelly and Daly, 2015; Mynarska et al, 2015; see also Chapter 3; Appendix 1).

The following text has been reproduced from a pamphlet called ‘Existing Evidence’ that I shared at the knowledge-exchange workshop discussed in Chapter 4.

Men, Poverty and Lifetimes of Care

While a growing body of qualitative research is beginning to emerge about the ‘lived experiences’ of low-income families living in poverty, the experiences of family men (that is, fathers and grandfathers) and the cumulative effects of living in conditions of poverty and disadvantage are still significant gaps in knowledge.

In response, two sets of archived qualitative longitudinal data, held in a research archive at the University of Leeds (Timescapes), have been analysed: (1) to explore men's everyday and long-term experiences of family life when living on a low-income and (2) to generate new research questions that derive from, and take into account, these findings. The first dataset, Following Young Fathers (FYF), provides evidence of the experiences of teenage fathers; the second, IGE, contains narratives of the lived experiences of mid-life grandparents (including grandfathers). Both sets of participants live in low-income localities in a northern city in England, and the datasets when brought together show the diverse ways in which men experience poverty and social exclusion over time, influencing the extent of support and care that they can provide and that they also receive.

In this pamphlet I present fragments of the stories of the men from both datasets to demonstrate that men value their roles as fathers and grandfathers but that, over time, they struggle to balance their responsibilities within particularly constrained circumstances. My intention is that these findings resonate with you and your own practice, and it would be really beneficial to explore those questions that you think will best support you, both in your practice and in policy making. All of the quotations used in this pamphlet are from the participants that were interviewed for the two archived projects and have been anonymised.

Men are committed to the people in their families and value their roles as fathers and grandfathers

Across the datasets, men engage in a range of care practices. Most of the men are fathers and grandfathers and they value these roles highly. They describe parenting as a process, and one that is learnt over time. For young men, fathering is a positive and valued role.

Fathering and Poverty both connects with and contributes to, ongoing public and policy debates and interdisciplinary scholarship about pressing and intersecting societal discussions and debates. These include men, masculinities and fatherhood; gender and care; and the lived experiences of family poverty. Taking forward ideas about fathering, families and poverty in new ways that have implications for practice and policy, this chapter confirms the overall thesis for the book. It argues that in a context of social ambivalence about men as carers, men with caring responsibilities remain highly isolated and welfare and market provision for ‘caring masculinities’ is being neither produced nor sustained.

In evidencing this argument and elaborating these advances, the key conclusions from the MPLC study are summarised to foreground the dynamic, relational, intersectional and context-specific character of men's experiences of low-income family life and caregiving across the lifecourse. This necessarily more complicated view of men and their participation in low-income families and contexts supports a more detailed understanding of the complex and evolving relationship between fathers, poverty, families and policy. I also re-emphasise that the realities of family and fathering for men in low-income contexts are often rendered invisible in research despite their heightened visibility in policy and public arenas.

It is important to acknowledge here that in bringing men's family participation in low-income families to the fore, the intention is not to generalise about the diverse and divergent trajectories and biographies of men in low-income families. Similarly, the arguments made are not offered to deny when some men are absent from households and family contexts. Indeed, Chapter 1 presents statistical evidence of father absence from households caused by change in family structures and within couple relationships. Chapter 7 also considers some of the mechanisms and processes that produce men's familial absence, highlighting where men are sometimes present in problematic ways as well. However, qualitative accounts of the meaning and experience of family for men, alongside evidence of some of the vital contributions that men make in low-income family contexts, are explored here in a societal context where they are typically obscured, broadly stigmatised and men are deprived both of recognition of their capabilities to care and of recognition of the value and significance of their family identities.

This chapter develops the conceptual framework for the empirical chapters of the book, outlining how dynamic and temporally orientated constructions of the key themes, namely fathering, poverty and family, underscore a sociological conceptualisation and explanation of men's family participation in low-income families. Given the dearth of empirical attention to men's care responsibilities and the patterning of their family lives and participation over time in low-income contexts, it is important to elaborate these key theoretical starting points. The concept of family participation is foregrounded in this book to capture, but also widen the scope of, current academic and policy interest in the father generation and to better understand how, why and when men participate in low-income family contexts. Greater family diversity and increased opportunities for men to engage in family care over the lifecourse are linked to both structural and cultural changes and indicate the need to incorporate and account for the active family participation of other male carers, as well as fathers.

Four currently disparate yet interrelated bodies of knowledge are woven together, synthesised and considered in relation to low-income fathering. These are family diversity and dynamics; masculinities ‘in transition’; the doing of kinship and family care; and approaches to theorising low-income family life. Drawing predominantly on feminist interdisciplinary literatures, the intersections of the gendered, classed and generational power relations that shape family relationships and structures are considered as foundational to the analyses and interpretations presented.

The chapter begins with a brief overview of qualitative longitudinal research as the key theoretical paradigm in which the study findings and conceptualisation of family participation are situated.

Qualitative longitudinal research: thinking dynamically

Given its intimate connection to the Timescapes programme of research (see Chapter 1), MPLC drew on perspectives and concepts from QLR. Taking the lifecourse as the central organising framework, QLR prioritises the temporal dimensions of lived experience to grasp the nature of social change (Neale, 2019). Research in this tradition demonstrates a commitment to an examination of how and why change is created, lived and experienced by individuals and understood by them in the context of broader societal shifts (Holland and Edwards, 2014).