ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to accomplish two major goals related to the overall purpose of this book. The first goal concerns the further reconceptualization of father involvement to include the topic of paternal participation in family-based programming. We believe that a greater understanding of the factors that predict whether fathers will participate in a familybased program will shed further light on how fathers more universally choose to become involved in various aspects of family life. The second goal of this chapter is the advancement of multimethod efforts to generate empirical information on fathers and families. The use of qualitative methods in conjunction with the gathering of quantitative data will help connect the specific voices of fathers to the information that can be inferred about fathers more generally in this area of inquiry.
