ABSTRACT
Exposure to the perspectives of distinct traditions in the social sciences challenges researchers to confront their own epistemological assumptions and to grapple with the discipline-specific, theoretical, and methodological discourse of others. This approach inevitably leads to a different type of scientific inquiry, one that not only stimulates a different set of research questions, but also presents a more integrative, complex, but perhaps less-tidy, picture of the phenomenon under study. These purposes lay at the core of this collection of writings. Each of the scientific disciplines represented in this Handbook of Father Involvement offer unique methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of fathering and to the interpretation of behavioral patterns that characterize ecological systems that include as well as extend beyond family units. Together, the chapters in this handbook offer provocative and challenging insight into the nature and meaning of fatherhood and father involvement by questioning longstanding assumptions about fathers’ roles in the lives of families and children in current history.
