Bringing Baby Home: Researching fathers in the first postnatal year

For our Bringing Baby Home report, published in June 2022, we reviewed what existing empirical evidence can tell us about UK fathers and fatherhood in the first year after the birth. We found that despite clear evidence of how fathers’ physical and mental health impacts on babies’ future health and wellbeing, there is a ‘dad-shaped hole’ in NHS and family services. Read more here.

To complement this review of research findings, we carried out a methodological review of the postnatal father-data collected by the major birth cohort studies on which much of the quantitative research into UK fathers, and families more widely, are based – the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) and Growing Up in Scotland (GUS).

This webinar will be an opportunity for researchers and research funders to hear about the Bringing Baby Home datasets review, and about innovative projects where researchers are embedding father-inclusive approaches in their work. We will hear from three speakers, and there will be time for questions and answers at the end of the session.

Rebecca Goldman will talk about the Fatherhood Institute’s Bringing Baby Home datasets review. This explores what questions were asked about fathers in the postnatal sweeps of these three UK birth cohort studies in order to, firstly, highlight data available for secondary analysis and, secondly, propose directions for data collection on future studies. We also examined to what extent the postnatal father-data from these three studies have been analysed to date in order to identify ‘under-studied’ UK birth cohort data; and the analytic potential of ongoing longitudinal studies. Rebecca is a Research Associate of the Fatherhood Institute and an independent research consultant specialising in evidence review.

Dr Iryna Culpin shares her time between Bristol University and Manchester Metropolitan University as a senior lecturer in Psychology. She has been awarded a Wellcome Trust Fellowship to explore the nature of father-mother-child relationships and child development in the context of maternal postnatal depression, using interdisciplinary methodology (epidemiological analyses of longitudinal datasets, behavioural observations and in-depth qualitative interviews). Dr Culpin will talk about Focus on Fathers, a sub-study dedicated specifically to antenatal and postnatal data collection with fathers, including head-cameras, which is embedded in the ongoing Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children Generation 2 (ALSPAC-G2) study.

Irina Lut is a third year Medical Research Council DTP funded PhD student based at the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health at University College, London. Irina will outline findings from the first systematic scoping review to comprehensively identify methods used globally for linking paternal and child records in administrative data sources, with recommendations for the UK. This review was co-authored by Dr. Katie Harron, Dr Pia Hardelid, Professor Margaret O’Brien and Dr Jenny Woodman at UCL.