Methods

This research was underpinned by two separate data collections: an online survey and a series of five online discussions. Detailed methods for each data collection are outlined below.

In order to understand the experiences and beliefs of a broad swath of American adult men and women from across the United States regarding men and caregiving, we conducted five three-day long online discussions using the 20|20 Research’s facilitation platform QualBoard. 20|20 recruited and screened focus group participants for each of the online discussions. The groups were conducted over four weeks in May 2019 and included a total of 68 participants. Participants were compensated for their time. The five groups were each with separate populations, with each group drawing the following populations from across the United States:

• A general population group of men 18 and older,
• A general population group of women 18 and older,
• A group of fathers of children ages zero to eight,
• A group of men who are currently caring for another adult, and
• A group of men who work in caregiving professions such as nursing or early childhood education. Physicians were excluded.

Better Life Lab at New America supplied 20|20 with six open-ended discussion prompt modules, with a first module of questions released early in the morning and a second in the early afternoon of each day of the three days that each board was active. All of the modules from the previous days remained available for respondents to engage with on the following days. The boards were live for five days, to allow participants extra time to finish answering questions. Participants could respond to moderators, moderators could ask participants follow-up questions to learn more about their experiences, and participants could ask questions of each other or comment on one another’s thoughts. Participants were asked about their experiences with leave, how they would feel about their employer offering a paid leave benefit, how they feel about coworkers using the benefit, and how they would feel about the government offering a universal paid leave policy. Researchers at the Better Life Lab used a grounded theory methodology to develop a coding scheme for the focus group transcripts and analyzed the data using these codes to identify common themes.

All moderators for the focus groups were women and interacted with participants using their actual first names and portraits as their avatars, which may have limited the disclosures some men made about their feelings around caregiving and paid leave. Other than those participants who explicitly gave us permission to report on their stories as journalists after the focus groups concluded, all focus group participant names have been changed to pseudonyms chosen by the authors of this report. The promise of anonymity in all public records may have encouraged participants to be open and honest.

The transcripts of these focus group discussions were coded using a grounded theory methodology. Coders began by reading the full transcripts of all five discussion boards. Coders then read through the transcripts a second time, noting themes. Themes were generated based on clear differences amongst participants on the questions, and common attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, as well as participants’ stated desires, motivations, and barriers. The coders then compared their notes and established a common list of codes that was all-inclusive of the noted findings, collapsing overlapping categories together without losing differences or details, and including working definitions of each code and how it should be applied. Using the established list of approximately 60 codes across the categories of Behavior, Beliefs, and Attitudes, coders went back through the five transcripts coding utterances with relevant codes. Coders ran two tests for coding accuracy—comparing their application of codes on the answers to two distinct discussion questions in two groups’ transcripts. Coders agreed on the application of codes in over 90 percent of cases. The key trends and themes these codes revealed are detailed throughout the report, with select quotations from participants that best exemplify these findings.

This study included a nationally representative online and phone survey of 2,966 adults in the United States. The survey was fielded between April 25 and May 16, 2019, with an overall margin of error of +/- 2.75 percent. The survey was conducted in English and Spanish by NORC at the University of Chicago on its AmeriSpeak platform for New America. Funded and operated by NORC at the University of Chicago, AmeriSpeak® is a probability-based panel designed to be representative of the U.S. household population. Randomly selected U.S. households are sampled with a known, non-zero probability of selection from the NORC National Sample Frame, and then contacted by U.S. mail, email, telephone, and field interviewers (face to face).

This survey included an oversample of the men 18 and older, as well as two additional non-probability oversamples of fathers of children zero to eight and men who currently work in caregiving professions. NORC partnered with Dynata for the father of zero to eight year-olds and professional male caregiver samples. The oversamples of men and fathers are included in this analysis; the professional caregiver oversample is not included. This research was done to support a better understanding of the perceived caregiving responsibilities of men and women with a focus on the parenting and caregiving roles of men.

Panelists were offered the cash equivalent of $3-7. New America and NORC collaborated on the writing of the survey instrument. Respondents were removed from the dataset if they completed the survey in two minutes or less (10 cases) or if they gave suspicious responses to grid items (13 cases).

Additional details about the study sampling and weighting are available from New America.