Research with us
Following Young Fathers Further is producing a wide range of data and outputs that can support students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, with their degrees, including assessments and independent study. If you are a current student, we provide detailed information on this page about how the research may benefit you.
For undergraduate researchers
If you require information about the ongoing findings from our research, then you may find our books, peer reviewed journal articles and working papers useful. These papers present our emerging findings and focus on key themes that we are exploring in our work. This includes the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on young fathers and on professionals.
While the working papers are not yet peer reviewed, they provide cutting edge knowledge and information about our findings and form the basis for the peer reviewed materials that we do expect to publish from the study in coming years.
We also have a page of research resources that you might use as a template for your own primary research. This includes templates for data archiving consent forms and our accessible participant information video which we produced to support our research at a distance.
If you are interested in conducting a qualitative secondary analysis for your dissertation or assignments there are opportunities to access existing data from our baseline study, Following Young Fathers. At the conclusion of the study we also intend to archive the data we produce to support students and researchers with the re-use of existing qualitative data. You can learn more about Timescapes and the Timescapes Archive on their website.
Study Director Prof. Anna Tarrant has published an edited collection with Sage about the possibilities for, and methods of, qualitative data re-use and qualitative secondary analysis with Dr Kahryn Hughes, Director of the Timescapes Archive.
Order here
PhD supervision and doctoral scholarship
We are keen to promote and support opportunities for doctoral research and study director Prof. Anna Tarrant welcomes proposals for PhD research. She is especially interested in supervising projects linked to any of the following topics:
- fatherhood and fathering
- young parenthood
- promoting father-inclusive, gender transformative practice
- men and masculinities
- the lifecourse
- family sociology
- qualitative longitudinal methodologies and qualitative secondary analysis
The team are especially keen to support projects that advance methods of qualitative secondary analysis using existing data generated for the Following Young Fathers study. If you have an idea for a PhD please contact Anna to discuss your idea. For more information about how to apply, please visit the University of Lincoln website here.
From our partners and young dads
“[daughter]'s almost two-year-old. She came up the house and she actually really liked it. Preferably my house is the best place for her to, for the contact to be, if I’m honest, 'cause we just buy toys for her all the time. We’ve got a lovely garden that she can play in, lovely, big, and we’ve got a sandpit in there. We’ve been buying loads of things for her to play with to keep her occupied.”
“[Speaking about support of young fathers] We’ve done a lot of kind of advocation and representing them, a lot of the time there’s involvement with statutory services. They don’t have the care of the young person, the care’s provided by the state or the mother, so we’ve attended lots of meetings with the young person to offer additional support and facilitated contact where necessary and offered just general emotional wellbeing, support, improving robustness and resilience, encouraging them to have as amicable relationship as possible.”
“And I suppose it goes back to what we were saying before about behaviours, maybe the education side of stuff and the fact that men aren’t involved in those early conversations, you know, whether it is, I know they’re invited to come along to bumps to babies but I don’t know whether we go into the detail around some of that brain development side of stuff and things like that. Maybe that is the thing that really would change things. You know, if you were given all of that information about what happens to a child as they grow, in a scientific way, as easy to understand as possible, could be the thing that impacted on behaviour in the home.”
“If your child’s with the mother, like your relationship with her depends on your relationship with the child, innit. That’s what I realised a lot, like you can try and be bitter, you can try and be this, be that, but it’s just gonna push you further away from your child, innit.”
“I wanna fight for more stuff for dads. Like I do wanna have that extra support for new dads or even existing dads that we don’t get now 'cause we’re still important too although obviously the mum does need the majority a’ the care because obviously of the after care and the birth. But like the dads take it extremely hard as well. And obviously with having no support I think it increases the rise of mental health.”
“I think both a mother and father combined, it’s communicating and both being on the same page of what’s best for your child or children, and for both, it’s just being there 100% for them and not, like, putting yourself first, it’s, you know, putting the child’s interests first... ”
“We need to be including, we need to not [just] be focusing on mum and child […] That’s a great focus but dad … dad’s not invisible, dad needs to be in the picture as well because there’s research that shows you the effect it has on children and families as a whole when dad isn’t in the picture, so services need to be changing the way in which they work so it’s more inclusive.”
“Cause I think a lot of the time, some of young people who end up having children have been through the care system or support systems and they can feel quite judged or labelled by organisations and it’s breaking the cycle and breaking them out of that to feel empowered to be able to take stuff back, that’s the real interest to me. So, it’s about getting support right, as in being there and giving advice and guidance and all them things that we can do, but also making sure that we are doing with people as opposed to people.”
“One of the most successful projects we ever did was an informal dads’ group, and it used to be on Saturdays […] they did what they wanted, they used to do things like breakfast, and they would have breakfast together and talk about dad stuff and where they were taking their kids. And that group was always really well attended because there was never an agenda. They were never judged. They were just there together.”
“...the whole stay at home dad thing is not something to be ashamed of, you know, if you’re a dad and you wanna take your daughter out for the day, or you wanna take your kid out for the day on your own, well why is that frowned upon, why can’t you take your child out for the day ”
“Oh…patience…compassion…tolerance, a whole boatload a’ that! Honestly, I like a whole lot of life. Sacrifice…compromise, yeah I think, yeah I think they, they would be the, the big, the five, I feel, I think that was five, they would be the main. ”
“We’re currently in touch with social services for two [dads] because they don’t understand why they can’t see their children because they haven’t been informed by social services, their partner. So there’s a massive communication breakdown with those young men, so that’s the main focus of what we’re dealing with at the minute.”
“it’s still…the…sense of judgement I get from other people when they find out that I have a child.And they say, ‘oh how old is she’.I say, ‘oh she’s ten’. And they say, ‘oh how old are you?’. Like you don’t need to know that....I know exactly where that thought process is going, you know. It’s like, ‘oh you look really young and you’ve had a kid’. It’s like, ‘yeah I know, I was there!’”
Partners
