Family Relations

Fagan, J., Pearson, J. and Kaufman, R. (February 2020). A descriptive study of low-income never-married fathers co-parenting with mothers and relatives. Family Relations: Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Science, 69, 29-35. DOI:10.1111/fare.12384.

Families are among the most interesting topics to research given their relevance to people’s daily lives. One of these studies is the one conducted by Fagan, Pearson and Kaufman (2020, 29-35) concerning the co-parenting relationships of low-income and never-married fathers. This research is interesting as it reflects many of the points outlined by Benokraitis (2015, pp.

27-54) in his book entitled Marriages & families: changes, choices, and constraints 8th ed.

The study covers the situation of a specific family setup in society. In particular, the research work by Fagan, Pearson and Kaufman (2020, pp. 29-35) aimed to describe the relationships that low-income, unmarried fathers have with the mothers and relatives of their children.

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The study represents the “Family Systems Perspective” as mentioned by Benokraitis (2015, p. 40) as it tries to explore the different roles and functions being played by the different participants in a family such as the father, mother and relatives.

In the end, the study was able to describe the family systems in this particular population, understanding how such co-parenting setups are affected by race and ethnicity, personal challenges and the number of children of the respondent fathers (Fagan, Pearson & Kaufman, 2020, p. 21). To come up with its conclusions, the study followed a scientific methodology.

The research implemented a quantitative method that recorded the answers of respondents. Using face-to-face interviews of more than 600 low-income, never-married fathers with at least one child, trained researchers were able to tabulate the answers of the respondents to close-ended questions regarding their relationship with the mothers and relatives of their children. The respondents were contacted through the community’s various fatherhood programs and represented a good portion of the actual population of the focus group given a large number of respondents (Fagan, Pearson & Kaufman, 2020, p. 25). Such a methodology has its strengths and weaknesses.

Surveys such as the one used in the research above have their advantages. Administering a survey is usually simple to conduct, inexpensive and, if done properly, can represent the sentiments and answers of the whole population (Benokraitis, 2015, p. 41). Moreover, the fact that close-ended questions were used in the survey suggests that the answers were not open to the interpretation of the researchers and are thus objective (Fagan, Pearson & Kaufman, 2020, p. 25). The methodology used, however, does have several weaknesses.

Surveys, however, can suffer from several disadvantages. Depending on the expertise and level of training of the researchers, a survey can suffer from a biased selection of the respondents (Benokraitis, 2015, p. 41). In this particular study, only respondents from fatherhood programs were interviewed. This sampling could have left out other potential respondents outside of this specified group. However, given a large number of respondents, the data collected from the survey could likely represent the population (Fagan, Pearson & Kaufman, 2020, p. 25). Beyond methodology, there are other concerns regarding the research that has to be evaluated.

Every research must comply with set ethical standards. In this particular study, the researchers should see to it that they do not inflict psychological harm to the respondents, must inform the fathers beforehand of the purpose and extent of the survey, and commit not to disclose any part of the survey answers to anyone (Benokraitis, 2015, p. 52). The researcher can comply with these ethical guidelines by simply always considering the welfare of the respondents and making sure they do not do anything to harm them.

Families present an interesting focus for research as their deeper understanding has significant implications on everyone’s life. One such study is the research work above by Benokraitis (2015, pp. 27-54) on co-parenting relationships with mothers and relatives of low-income, unmarried fathers. The research work stands out as it represents the guidelines of a good scientific study.