ABSTRACT
Qualitative researchers using in-depth interviewing can use diverse analytic frameworks to study the processes underlying father involvement as well as the way men describe and interpret their lives as fathers or prospective fathers (Lupton & Barclay, 1997; Riessman, 1993), Some of these frameworks can be distinguished from one another according to their epistemological assumptions. Traditional ethnographies and grounded theories, for example, treat first-person accounts as “realistic descriptions” that “mirror a world ‘out there,’” a position consistent with the positivist tradition of survey methods. In contrast, narrative analysis is skeptical of realist assumptions, preferring instead to view participants’ stories as being “constructed, creatively authored, rhetorical, replete with assumptions, and interpretive” (Riessman, 1993, pp. 4-5).
