Introduction

This chapter reflects on the ways in which mixing methods allow empirical exploration of the impact of social change on family life and how this process opens up fathering and fatherhood as research themes. Forming the basis of this analysis is a Danish research project called Families and Social Networks in the Modern Welfare State (FAMOSTAT), which studies the consequences of ongoing modernisation for family life. A presentation of the research design and analytical approach illustrates how fathers and fatherhood emerged as an important research theme by focusing on everyday family life primarily from a social psychological perspective. Working with multiple methods facilitates a genuinely exploratory approach that unleashes both empirical sensitivity and theoretical creativity. Mixing methods, however, is neither easy nor straightforward as a research strategy due to the epistemological dilemmas and theoretical challenges that are not easily resolved, yet this messiness and ambiguity must be tolerated in order to allow an open exploration of changing social phenomena such as fatherhood.

Divided into three major sections, this chapter begins with a presentation of the theoretical background and main focus, which is the impact of modernisation on family life in a Scandinavian welfare context, namely Denmark. We conceptualise modernisation as processes of individualisation and detraditionalisation and aim to investigate these processes empirically. The next section presents our mixed-method study and begins by briefly introducing mixed methods as the framework of our analytical approach. This section also contains a description of the empirical design, sampling strategies and data generation methods. The study comprises quantitative survey data (n=1,003) from computer-assisted telephone interviews and qualitative interview data from face-to-face interviews. Next, the comprehensive analytical process, which employed survey and interview data, is accounted for to explain how the exploratory approach that results from using mixed methods led to the emergence of fathering and fatherhood as a research theme. So vast was the amount of data generated that only a fraction of it is presented here. The third section discusses the benefits and challenges of mixing of methods. The central argument presented is that establishing a dialogue between qualitative and quantitative data provides greater empirical insight and enables in-depth theoretical analysis, which demonstrates that a social psychological approach to everyday life facilitates the coherence of the work.