Research to Support Fathers
Otima Doyle, PhD, began studying fathers during her tenure as a pre-doctoral Maternal and Child Health Fellow at the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s School of Social Work. In order to synthesize her clinical and research interests, she completed competitive postdoctoral training in intervention research and clinical trials as a PREMIER (Partnership for Excellence in Mental Health Interventions Education and Research; T32MH065742-8) postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University. While at Duke, Dr. Doyle was awarded a competitive NIMH Research Supplement to Promote Diversity in Health Related Research (Diversity Supplement; PA-08-190). Doyle returned to a social work faculty appointment at the University of Illinois, Jane Addams College of Social Work in order to train future social work leaders and simultaneously continue her interdisciplinary research collaborations. Dr. Doyle’s research centers on understanding familial risk and protective factors for youth at-risk for aggression and depression. She has a special interest in African American fathers and the development of preventive interventions
To date, most family research on has focused on mothers so Doyle’s efforts contribute to a growing field focused on understanding and supporting the role of fathers in family life. Her focus on African American fathers is important because they often share childcare responsibilities with their child’s mother regardless of their residential or socioeconomic status, or even their relationship status with the child’s mother. Further, African American males, both fathers and their sons, are faced with unique social and cultural contexts characterized by their disproportionate risk for social harassment and other experiences with racism and discrimination. Yet African American fathers are often understudied and misunderstood, and little is known about their parenting experiences or perspectives about effective, father-focused interventions for at-risk youth.
Dr. Doyle designed and implemented a qualitative study, called Voices ‘n Visions, with fathers of pre-adolescent sons who were at-risk for developing aggressive behaviors, depressive symptoms, or both. This study focuses on a number of factors related to fathers’ parenting and co-parenting experiences, as well as fathers’ perceptions of father focused prevention programs for their at-risk sons. Dr. Doyle and her colleagues have published and presented findings related to a number of different qualitative analyses from this dataset. Among them is the exploration of African American fathers’ parenting practices. Through this investigation, Doyle and her group discovered four interrelated parenting practices used by African American fathers: managing emotions, encouragement, discipline, and monitoring. Fathers’ parenting practices were at times influenced by their environmental context, residential status, and masculine ideologies. Through an investigation of African American fathers’ co-parenting experiences, Doyle and colleagues found that fathers value family, co-parenting relationships, and the father-son relationship; described their unique contributions as fathers; and identified gender as a main factor regarding differences in parents’ parenting approaches. Discipline and communication with their co-parent were identified as important co-parenting domains for fathers.
Understanding and supporting African American fathers in family life also requires an understanding of the fathers’ own experiences with mental illness and mental health service use. As a part of her quantitative investigation, Doyle and colleagues published a mental health profile of African American and Caribbean Black fathers based on nationally representative data from the National Survey of American Life. Findings highlight variations based on ethnicity and nativity in national prevalence rates of mental illness, socio-demographic correlates, and mental health service use among US Black fathers.
Implications of Doyle’s work ranges from how to better engage fathers and sons in family-level interventions, to how to better meet the gendered, cultural, social, and mental health needs of African American fathers. Her work is unique in that it introduces African American fathers’ voices into important areas for which they have not often been included. Through the Voices ‘n Visions study, Dr. Doyle will continue to explore African American fathers’ perspectives and experiences with fathering. In the future, she also plans to develop father-focused programs that will support African American fathers in family life, and reduce youths’ risks for negative developmental outcomes.