Introduction

Research on men's experiences of being fathers and fatherhood has proliferated over the past 30 years in the western world. This development reflects broader structural, cultural, economic and political shifts in family and work lives and associated theorisations around gender and caring capacities. The resulting body of research has often focused on men's experiences of becoming fathers and the early years of fatherhood. There has also been an interest in research questions that reflect an epistemological commitment to interpretivism, leading to small-scale, qualitative exploration of groups of men's experiences in particular contexts. The piecing together of these finely focused research outputs has led to collective, comparative and nuanced overviews. These have been complimented by broader, brush-stroke, quantitative research revealing statistical patterns and illuminating trends, for example, in relation to fathers’ involvement in the domestic and paid work spheres. Even so, there continues to be a lack of regularly collected, national-level, large-scale data available on fathers (Nuffield Foundation; Burgess, et al, 2017). In 1992, the ‘first estimates of the lifetime fathering of a nationally representative sample of men living in private households’ was produced from an analysis of the British Household Panel Study (Burghes et al, 1997). But in the intervening period, the lack of nationally available data – and so crucial knowledge – regarding fathers’ involvement in their children's lives has continued to be noted amid calls for ‘data improvement’ (Burgess, et al, 2017). Of course, it is important to also acknowledge that the category ‘father’ operates in complex ways; for example, the biological fact of being a father may remain unknown and residency, non-residency and legal fatherhood can further complicate the category. But this should not impede research attempts to collect and improve baseline and other data; in fact, it makes the endeavour all the more necessary. Research designs that include repeat interviews or other forms of data collection over time are also lacking – with some notable exceptions, such as the Timescapes projects (www.timescapes.leeds.ac.uk) – in the research literature. Yet longitudinal research can be especially illuminating when complex categories and experiences are the focus of research. Only through data improvement in its various and multiple forms can our knowledge on fathers and fatherhood experiences become necessarily enhanced.