Solution-Focused Brief Therapy-Enhanced Fatherhood Curriculum Pilot Study

Overview: This study tested a fatherhood curriculum enhanced with Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) in online, hybrid, and in-person formats using a quasi-experimental design. Findings suggest the online version of the SFBT-enhanced curriculum is effective as its in-person or hybrid counterparts, providing implications on helping fathers better access fatherhood programs.Proposal text:

Background: Fathers’ and their roles as parents are an important target for intervention to improve child and family wellbeing. However, fatherhood program recruitment and retention are currently an ongoing challenge for fathers, particularly for those from young, racially and ethnically diverse, and low-income families. An important "next step" in the field is to identify different strategies and interventions that can help fathers better engage in programs to improve their fathering attitudes and involvement in rearing their children. Thus, this pilot study tested the effectiveness of a standard fatherhood curriculum enhanced with Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) in improving solution-building skills, involvement in families, and parenting attitudes and compared it with the standard fatherhood curriculum.

Methods: This pilot study used a time-lagged quasi-experimental (QED) pre-test and post-test design whereby two groups of fathers (n=92) participated in a group fatherhood curriculum at a community-based social service agency. Participating fathers were randomly assigned to two groups: 1) the comparison group that received fatherhood services as usual and; 2) the treatment group that received a new curriculum that integrated the elements of SFBT. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the treatment groups were changed from in-person to an online format, which enabled us to compare the effect sizes of the fatherhood curriculum that was delivered in the standard in-person format, a hybrid curriculum that met in-person and online, and an online curriculum. Two of the measures, [i.e., solution-building skills (Jordan, 2014) and involvement in families (Dyer et al., 2014)] were collected at posttest for all of the comparison, hybrid, and online groups. Parenting attitudes measure (Conners et al., 2006) was collected at the pre-and post-test periods. For analyses, independent samples and paired samples t-tests were used to detect group differences and Hedge’s g effect sizes (Shadish & Haddock, 1994) were also calculated to examine the magnitude of treatment effects.

Results: The results showed that the SFBT-enhanced fatherhood curriculum improved fathers’ parenting attitudes from pretest to posttest; however, the SFBT-enhanced curriculum group was not statistically different from the comparison group on three outcome variables. The comparison of solution-building skills and involvement in families by curriculum delivery method revealed that the online curriculum group had higher effect sizes when compared to the hybrid or the in-person groups, suggesting that responsible fatherhood groups could be successfully delivered in a fully online format.

Conclusion: The findings of our study offer important insights into the potential for responsible fatherhood programming to be provided online to improve fathers’ access to fatherhood programs and services. Social work practitioners and program evaluators can choose the appropriate selection of delivery modes for providing fatherhood programs. For example, providing online programs that make use of digital content and technology, including open-source materials, and apps can be beneficial in increased usage of digital platforms and technologies in this COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. And incorporating SFBT techniques into the standard fatherhood curriculum may also yield benefits for participants around solution-building and engagement.