ABSTRACT
Social surveys are probably the most heavily used tool in the sociologist’s tool bag. There are several good reasons for this. Much of what sociologists conceptualize as the important questions to be answered can be efficiently and effectively addressed with survey type questions. Most sociological research is quantitative; surveys are an effective mechanism to gather data best suited to quantitative research methods. Sociological approaches lean toward making generalizations. Generalizations are most comfortably made from analyses of data that are representative of the population of interest; surveys are an efficient means of obtaining a representative sample. Therefore, it is not surprising that the vast majority of research done on fathers and fathering from a sociological perspective has involved the use of social surveys. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the critical role in the scholarship on fathers played by three social surveys: the National Survey of Children (NSC), the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), and the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH). I will argue that these surveys were the foundation for key empirical contributions to our knowledge about fathers through the 1980s and 1990s, challenged current thinking in ways that have lead to critical advances in our understanding about fathers, and each, in its own way, has set the stage for current and planned data collection efforts.
