Saying, Doing, Talking, Listening: A Mixed Methods Study of Fathers’ Involvement in Childcare and Household Work Tasks and Responsibilities

Abstract

This article examines how methodological approaches shape understandings of domestic responsibilities. Using mixed methods data from Canadian dual-earner households, we compare fathers’ individual survey responses with couple interview accounts about their childcare and housework involvement. Survey and interview data align when assessing tasks – discrete actions with defined boundaries – but diverge when evaluating responsibilities, which involve anticipating needs, managing care and organizing household life. These discrepancies also reflect how gendered and racialized expectations can influence how fathers conceptualize their contributions. We argue that couple interviews reveal relational dimensions of domestic responsibilities that survey data alone cannot capture. This study advances feminist and family sociology by theorizing household labour not only as a set of measurable actions but as socially situated and cognitively distributed practices. Methodological pluralism, we contend, is essential to understanding the meanings and organization of care in everyday life.

Introduction

That quantitative and qualitative methods reveal different social phenomena is practically a truism (Sale et al., 2002; Small, 2011). These methods reflect distinct epistemological traditions, and ontological underpinnings, and many argue that combining them is inherently contradictory due to their differing assumptions about how social knowledge is generated (Guba and Lincoln, 1982; Small, 2011; Smith and Heshusius, 1986). Yet, research on divisions of household labour and childcare demands precisely this sort of methodological dialogue. ¹ This is less a question of competing perspectives than of methodological adequacy: different tools yield different understandings, and some are inherently more capable of capturing the nuanced narrated experiences of domestic life. Quantitative survey analyses excel in documenting patterns in task allocations but may gloss over how other forms of household labour are shared. Conversely, qualitative approaches unpack the embedded meanings and relational negotiations surrounding domestic responsibilities but lack the comparative breadth to assess variation across populations (Eichler and Albanese, 2007; Pugh, 2013). Used in isolation, each method risks producing a partial picture of domestic life.

Recognizing the analytical importance of methodological diversity, this article compares individual fathers’ survey responses about their involvement in childcare and housework with negotiated accounts from couple interviews with their spouses. We find that survey and interview responses to identical questions about responsibilities for housework and childcare diverge, a point often asserted yet rarely demonstrated systematically. Survey responses typically overestimate fathers’ contributions or, alternatively, couple interviews underestimate them. We advance the literature in family sociology and the sociology of domestic responsibilities by clarifying how these divergent perceptions arise from couples’ differing conceptualizations of responsibilities, shaped by their socio-cultural contexts, and intersecting gendered and racialized identities. Although generalizable survey data are crucial for policy and advocacy (McCall, 2005; Oakley, 1998), we argue that couple interviews uniquely capture the dynamic, socio-historical and relational frameworks through which family members define, interpret and negotiate their responsibilities for care and housework.

This contribution matters because it invites researchers and policymakers to complement quantitative measures of domestic labour with deeper inquiries into how household responsibilities are cognitively and relationally negotiated. By combining survey data with couple interviews, our study not only reveals divergences between individual and jointly constructed accounts but also illuminates the intersubjective processes through which care responsibilities are justified and made meaningful. These insights are essential for theorizing household labour as both interpretive and distributional practices. The article proceeds as follows. First, we review sociological debates about how to methodologically address gaps between what people say they do and what they actually do and consider how these concerns intersect with research on housework and childcare. We then introduce our methods, which employ unique survey and couple interview data from the Familydemic Survey and the Care/Work Portrait project. We present our key findings on discrepancies between individual responses in the survey and couple interview data and conclude with an argument about the merits of mixed methods and especially couple interviews, when studying responsibilities for housework and childcare.

Interviews: Saying versus Doing

Debates about interviewing, dating back to the early 20th century (e.g. Becker and Geer, 1957), have been revisited by cultural sociologists who argue that subconscious, automatic cognition largely drives social action (Martin, 2010; Vaisey, 2009). The methodological implication of this argument is that if actions stem primarily from subconscious snap judgements, they are best understood through survey data. Survey questions, by providing respondents with forced-choice options that encourage rapid responses, are believed to be less cognitively demanding and more reflective of actual behaviour. Proponents of this perspective argue:

If talking about our mental processes with an interviewer is like describing a criminal suspect to a sketch artist, then answering survey questions is like picking the suspect out of a lineup. The latter is much less cognitively demanding and potentially much more accurate, provided the right choices are in the lineup. (Vaisey, 2009: 1689)

According to this line of argumentation, qualitative interviews provide at best a sketch of some objective truth, while surveys, because they are less cognitively taxing, can better anticipate behaviour.

Critics counter this assertion by arguing that interviews are not primarily intended to identify causal relationships between stated beliefs and actual behaviour but rather serve interpretive and constructionist epistemologies that prioritize understanding subjective meanings, motivations and practices (Holstein and Gubrium, 2003; Pugh, 2013). Interviews can illuminate how gendered and racialized social structures influence individuals’ understandings of social boundaries and status hierarchies (Lamont and Swidler, 2014). Lamont and Swidler (2014: 159) highlight that critiques of interviewing oversimplify its value by suggesting:

Only visible, public ‘behaviour’ is somehow real, or causally significant. But for many people the imagined meanings of their activities, their self-concepts, their fantasies about themselves (and about others) are also significant, and we generally cannot get at those without asking, or at least without talking to people.

Put differently, the positivist methodological ambition to uncover objective social facts is a goal that is not necessarily shared by qualitative interviewers, who tend to prioritize and value post-positivist approximations of social reality or to understand social constructionist perspectives on social life (Reczek, 2014).

Listening about Housework and Childcare

‘Talking to people’ is only one part of the puzzle. Listening critically is where epistemological distinctions become clear (Doucet, 2008; Lareau, 2021). How we listen, and then analyse and write from these listenings, reveals key differences between researchers. Take the work of Meg Luxton (1980), for example. Throughout the 1970s, Luxton interviewed and observed 100 women from different generations living in Flin Flon, Manitoba, a Canadian mining community. Luxton was broadly interested in generational differences in women’s paid and unpaid work. One of her questions focused on how much time women dedicated to preparing meals. She reported that:

There was significant consistency in the amount of time women reported they spent on food preparation. However, this reported time allocation did not correspond very well to the amount of time actually spent on each of the tasks in twenty of the households in which I was able to observe the housewife at work. In one case, the woman said that she did not prepare breakfast. Shortly afterward, her preschooler woke up and she got him cereal with milk and sugar, toast and peanut butter, and a glass of milk. It took her fifteen minutes to get it all organized and on the table. Later it took ten minutes to clean up after he had eaten. (Luxton, 1980: 142)

It is possible that for this woman, preparing breakfast meant cooking a hot meal, which is more time intensive. Luxton does not ruminate on why this woman underestimated her time commitment (or indeed, whether she possessed a different conception of what it means to spend time preparing breakfast) – she only observes it. This example, and time discrepancies in general, highlight the methodological tensions between emic and etic perspectives of what it means to contribute to housework and childcare (Baxter, 2000; Baxter and Western, 1998). Luxton’s findings also underscore that individual interpretations of tasks and responsibilities significantly shape data outcomes, and that the meanings of care and unpaid care work are contextually situated and socially constructed.

Recent methodological discussions among cultural sociologists mirror work and family scholars’ long held debates on the merits of various methods for capturing the allocation of housework and childcare. Most arguments hinge on how best to measure the time dedicated to housework tasks and childcare. Studies find that time-use diaries, in which participants report on the time they dedicate to their daily activities, tend to have lower estimates of chore-hours than do surveys (Bianchi et al., 2000; Kan, 2008; Yavorsky et al., 2015). This may be because surveys cannot account for tasks that are accomplished simultaneously, leading participants to double-count the time spent on various chores (Coltrane, 2000; LaChance-Grzela and Bouchard, 2010).

The challenges with measuring responsibilities for childcare and housework are compounded because responsibilities, unlike tasks, are not discrete. Conceptually, responsibilities for childcare and housework encapsulate a variety of care practices that span community-based work (DeSena, 2006; Lindsay et al., 2024) and social cognition (Daminger, 2019; Dean et al., 2022; Wayne et al., 2023). ² They include forms of labour that are not as readily noticeable because they may not be marked by a clearly defined beginning, middle and end; they are ongoing, iterative and reciprocal (Brooks and Hodkinson, 2022; Doucet, 2015). Building on the work of feminist care theory, including that of Tronto (2013), we conceptualize responsibilities for childcare and for household work as a series of four interconnected phases: (1) caring about, (2) caring for, (3) care-giving and (4) care-receiving. ³ Thinking of care this way foregrounds how care responsibilities are inherently relational and processual phenomena, are contingent on care-giver and care-receiver dynamics, and influence and are influenced by broader social contexts.

As much of this work is invisible, and because there is growing academic interest in this type of household and childcare labour – especially when it concerns men’s involvement in care work (Brooks and Hodkinson, 2022; Daminger, 2019; Doucet, 2015; Miller, 2011; Petts, 2022) – it is important to assess continuities and discontinuities across sociological methodologies for measuring responsibilities for care.

Our central aim, therefore, is to link these debates with the empirical objectives of our study. Specifically, we pose the following research questions: (1) To what extent do fathers’ individual survey reports of domestic involvement align with the negotiated narratives produced in couple interviews? (2) What does misalignment between survey responses and couple interview narratives reveal about the cognitive and relational dimensions of domestic responsibility? These questions are informed by the recognition that methodological choices embody distinct epistemological positions. We propose couple interviews as uniquely situated to bridge positivist survey methodologies – which provide broad, generalized insights – and interpretive qualitative methods – which capture the nuanced, relational dimensions of care responsibilities that are revealed through listening to people. Couple interviews facilitate an integrated perspective by accommodating various epistemological perspectives, including post-positivist, constructionist, feminist, interpretive and post-humanist approaches (Doucet and Mauthner, 2007; Mauthner, 2021; Reczek, 2014; Schadler, 2016; Valentine, 1999).

In subsequent sections, we compare parental responsibilities with discrete tasks to illuminate how methodological differences generate distinct empirical findings and epistemological interpretations. Tasks, routine or intermittent, have clear temporal boundaries (Baxter, 2000; LaChance-Grzela and Bouchard, 2010). Analysing the differences between tasks and responsibilities enables us to see how surveys and interviews are useful for different purposes, and how they are each framed within and by a researcher’s epistemic community and their theoretical, epistemological and ontological moorings. We also note that a silver lining of renewed debates on methodology has been greater attention to how context matters in and frames all research (Jerolmack and Khan, 2014). This is our point of departure for examining methodological approaches to responsibilities for housework and childcare.

Data and Methods

This research stems from a larger set of studies concerning fathers’ involvement in housework and childcare. We compare two different methodological responses with the same questions regarding household tasks and responsibilities: fathers’ survey answers and fathers’ interview responses in couple interviews.

Survey Data

We analysed responses to questions about household division of childcare and housework tasks and responsibilities using the Familydemic Survey, an international survey with over 25,000 respondents across six countries – Canada, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the United States. The Familydemic Survey investigates issues relating to family life and paid and unpaid work during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the country level, it samples at least 2000 respondents aged 20–59 who live with a child 10 years old or younger. Our study includes the Canadian survey data, which were collected by Angus Reid from August to September 2021. ⁴

The Canadian survey data team created a sample matrix that was representative of the Canadian population, including quotas for ensuring minimum rates of representation from each province as well as from historically underrepresented groups such as LGBTQ+ individuals, people of colour (non-Indigenous respondents identifying as non-white) and Indigenous people. Participants were then randomly selected to receive email invitations to complete the survey and were offered a $100 CAD monetary incentive.

The survey asked questions about both tasks and responsibilities. Tasks refer to discrete activities that have a defined beginning and end, such as transporting children to after-school activities, or doing the laundry. As the survey data are not dyadic, we do not have paired couple responses to the questions about tasks and responsibilities. Instead, we examined the survey responses of fathers in dual earning partnerships – who assessed their involvement at home vis-a-vis their spouse/partner – to the following questions about involvement in tasks: ‘Who in your household does the following household tasks currently: playing/reading to the children; helping with schoolwork; transport and accompaniment to activities; cooking and preparing meals; daily kitchen cleaning; deep cleaning; laundry; and paying bills?’ The response options for each question were: Always or usually me; Always or usually my partner; My partner and I share about equally; Always or usually someone else; or does not apply.

In the survey preamble, responsibilities – the more cognitively demanding forms of housework and childcare – were distinguished from tasks: ‘Responsibility means noticing needs and managing, organizing and planning different spheres of family life.’ In the present study, we examine survey responses from fathers in dual earning partnerships to questions about responsibilities for: children’s daily life and activities; children’s schooling; housework/cleaning; repairs/maintenance; keeping in touch with other family members; and family finances. The response options were the same as those for questions about tasks.

Interview Data

Survey respondents could opt into an interview study. We provided Angus Reid with our qualitative study parameters: partnered fathers whose spouses also work full-time, and who had previously taken parental leave and/or had made use of flexible work arrangements. Out of the survey respondents, 24 fathers chose to participate in online interviews with their partners during the summer of 2022, roughly eight months after the survey. Four men were interviewed alone, so the analysis focuses on the interviews conducted with 20 couples.

We used Doucet and Klostermann’s Care/Work Portrait, a ‘participatory and visual method that engages individuals and couples in mapping and discussing their household and care tasks and responsibilities’ (Doucet and Klostermann, 2024: 243). It is a digital app that has the feel of a board game, with columns for sorting tasks and responsibilities into various categories: (1) children and childcare; (2) household work; (3) extended family and community care/work; (4) paid work; and (5) self-care/work. The technique consists of providing an overview of the app and explaining how to sort task and responsibility cards into one of five columns: (a) Participant A, (b) Mostly Participant A, (c) Shared, (d) Mostly Participant B and (e) Participant B. Over the course of the interview, participants are encouraged to reflect on any unexpected outcomes, whether there have been changes in divisions of childcare and household work over time, which tasks and responsibilities they enjoy or dislike and what the Care/Work Portrait would look like in an ideal world.

Throughout the interview, each participant is provided space to reflect on their involvement in the tasks and responsibilities. In the event of disagreement over who is primarily responsible for a given task or responsibility, we pause and provide more time for discussion, guiding the conversation as necessary. Once the couple arrives at an agreement, we move on to the next item listed. It is important to note that the purpose of the Care/Work Portrait is not to arrive at some absolute truth about who does what. Rather, we are interested in couples’ sensemaking, their body language and how they interact in these discussions.

Tasks and responsibilities were distinguished in the interviews using the following wording:

We will start by asking you about who does particular tasks and then ask about responsibilities. Responsibilities are about noticing, making decisions and putting a plan in place, making sure the work gets done, and monitoring and making changes as needed. Some people call this ‘the mental load’ or household management and administration. This is not about doing the work – but the thinking and planning, the emotional and cognitive work.

Because the interviews took place months after the survey had been conducted, we asked couples to reflect on the allocation of tasks and responsibilities currently, as well as over the past year. Interviews were video recorded and transcribed. We analysed the interviews using an adapted version of the Listening Guide, a feminist, narrative, relational method that includes multiple readings of transcripts that account for our reflexive, relational, responsive and responsible roles as researchers (Gilligan et al., 2006; Mauthner and Doucet, 1998, 2003). The Listening Guide approach (1) draws our attention to situated knowledges and multiple kinds of reflexivity, including biographical and epistemic reflexivity; (2) acknowledges the multiple and oftentimes contradictory narratives put forth by interview participants, and questions why this is the case, how it matters and how we hear and write about these narratives; (3) situates participant narratives in broader historical, socio-cultural and geo-political contexts and public narratives; and (4) identifies what conceptual narratives (dominant, emergent, resistant) are shaping the stories told/heard?

Both authors undertook multiple readings of the transcripts and reflected and wrote down responses to the Listening Guide questions. We next met (in six sessions that lasted two hours each) to discuss our analyses of the interviews. These sessions were recorded and transcribed and before each of our analysis sessions, we reviewed the interview recordings and transcripts, guided by the Listening Guide readings.

We focused on questions about involvement in the following tasks: helping with schoolwork; transporting and accompanying children to activities; cooking and meal prep; daily kitchen cleaning; household cleaning; laundry; and paying bills. And we focused on key questions about responsibilities for: children’s daily childcare; schooling; household cleaning; house/car/yard maintenance; extended family relationships; and financial planning. ⁵

Comparing Survey and Interview Responses

We focused on the survey responses of fathers who participated in Care/Work Portrait interviews with their partners, comparing their individual survey answers to those provided jointly during the interviews. Since the interviews offered a broader set of response categories (e.g. all interviewee A, mostly interviewee A, shared equally, mostly interviewee B, all interviewee B), we grouped the ‘all’ and ‘mostly’ categories together. Additional options included ‘not applicable’ and ‘someone else does this’. We created a database to code responses from interview questions aligned with survey questions and compared these using Cohen’s Kappa. This statistic accounts for chance agreement between coding options. According to Landis and Koch (1977), Kappa values specify the following levels of agreement: 0 to 0.2 (slight), 0.21 to 0.4 (fair), 0.41 to 0.6 (moderate), 0.61 to 0.8 (substantial) and 0.81 to 1 (perfect).

Findings

Table 1 displays rates of agreement between fathers’ responses to questions about their involvement in tasks and responsibilities in the survey and the responses they gave alongside their partner in the Care/Work Portrait interview. There is mostly slight and fair agreement regarding fathers’ contributions to responsibilities, with involvement in their children’s daily lives, in housework and in repairs demonstrating greater difference. There are two exceptions to this pattern in questions about household responsibility: we see substantial agreement between the survey and interview responses regarding fathers’ involvement in schooling and their involvement in finances.

Table 1.

Agreement rates between survey and couple interview responses to fathers’ involvement in household and childcare tasks and responsibilities.

Note. The colour gradients in Table 1 represents the degree of interrater agreement: cells shaded in blue denote lower levels of agreement, whereas those shaded in red denote higher levels.

Looking at fathers’ responses regarding involvement in tasks, the survey data aligned closely with their responses in the Care/Work Portrait interview. Apart from their involvement in household and kitchen cleaning, which had moderate agreement, fathers’ individual assessments of their involvement from the survey data align closely with their assessment in the Care/Work Portrait interviews alongside their partners. We found either substantial or perfect agreement for tasks related to schoolwork help, transportation, cooking, laundry and paying bills.

The levels of agreement between survey and couple interview responses regarding contributions to tasks suggest that it is more challenging to discern contributions to responsibilities for housework and childcare.

Over- or Underestimating?

Although the Kappa statistic tells us the extent to which there is agreement between the two modes of responses, it does not tell us whether fathers are overestimating or underestimating their involvement in responsibility labour and tasks in the surveys compared with the couple interviews. For each instance of inconsistency between the survey response and the interview response, we examined who the survey respondent (i.e. the father) had indicated had a higher level of involvement – himself or his spouse. Figure 1 indicates that in survey responses, fathers tended to overestimate their contributions to responsibility labour to a higher degree than they did for task labour when compared with the allocation of tasks and responsibilities decided upon by couples in interviews.

Figure 1.

Fathers’ aggregated rates of over- and underestimating involvement in tasks and responsibilities in surveys versus couple interviews.

Figure 2 disaggregates each category by the type of task or responsibility in question. Compared with how they responded alongside their partners, in the survey, fathers overestimated their contributions to responsibilities for repairs and housework and they underestimated their involvement in responsibilities for daily childcare. They also underestimated their contributions to the task of kitchen cleaning.

Figure 2.

Fathers’ disaggregated rates of over- and underestimating involvement in tasks and responsibilities in surveys versus couple interviews.

Turning to our interview data, we examine how and why overestimation and underestimation occur in reporting responsibilities for housework and childcare. We show that these inconsistencies arise from divergent conceptualizations of responsibility, shaped by individuals’ social locations and interpretive frameworks.

Explaining Differing Perspectives on Fathers’ Contributions to Household and Childcare Responsibilities with Couple Interviews

Among the fathers surveyed, it was more common to overestimate their involvement in responsibilities for housework, compared with what they disclosed in couple interviews. One example of this is Paul. ⁶ He and his wife Wendy live on a farm in Eastern Canada with their two daughters, aged three and six. Wendy runs an in-home daycare, and Paul works as an environmental technologist. Wendy decided to move from being an early childhood educator in a private daycare to running one in their home so that she could be with her daughters. Paul and Wendy share that they are having a challenging time finding balance and have sought therapy about this. Wendy feels worn out by the chronic mental load of housework and meal preparation. She cooks all day for the daycare children, and by the evening, she feels exhausted at the prospect of having to cook dinner. Paul believes it is easier for Wendy to do the laundry and meal prep because she is home all day. Paul reports being wary of helping to cook because some of the groceries are reserved for daycare meals, and he does not want to mistakenly use those groceries. Although Paul could work from home if he wanted to, he finds it too distracting and chooses to drive to his office instead, which is a 40-minute commute each way.

In contrast to how he acknowledged Wendy’s heavy workload at home in the couple interview, Paul reported in his survey that he was equally involved at home when it came to responsibilities for housework. While speaking to Paul and Wendy, the interconnectedness of work and home became apparent, and this provided insight into why Paul indicated that he shares in responsibilities evenly when he answered the survey:

Paul: I’m kind of in a unique position where I bank all my overtime, and I use that banked overtime to take a day and work here [at home] to build the barn or put electric fence up around the pasture.

Andrea (Interviewer): That’s interesting. So, you do it to get more time to do home things.

Paul: But I guess with that being said, we’re building a barn and [Wendy is] training horses, but it’s – we’ve registered it as a business. So, it’s both.

Andrea (Interviewer): Okay. Is there anything else, like overall responsibility for the meal planning or the cleaning? The planning children’s parties? Would you change that, Wendy, if you could? Would you want him to do more about planning and thinking?

Wendy: One hundred per cent. I hate having the mental load. I’m a very anxious person, and having all of this on my plate is just mentally draining . . . I would love Paul to help. But I know there’s other things that need to get done. Like I need to sacrifice some things for him to go do other things for me. So, it’s just, where do you take from? I know we tried looking at getting a house cleaner, but Paul doesn’t like to spend money, so we didn’t keep them around for very long.

Paul: We’ve discussed it a lot and there’s definitely been nights I’ve come home from work Wendy says, ‘I’m tired. You’re doing supper tonight.’ But the vast majority of the time, she recognizes we need to go work on whatever – there’s a project that needs to get done that night. So, she starts up [dinner] before I even get home from work.

Andrea (Interviewer): Do you mean there is work at work, or work at home?

Wendy: At home.

Paul: It’s hard to differentiate for us because she’s got the business – like the daycare is a business that we need to look after, maintain toys and play spaces for the kids. And now we’ve got the new barn and horses and everything we’re trying to build for that. Like we’re building a new barn this summer that I’m doing myself, so I’ve been collecting the fallen trees, bringing in a portable sawmill, milling the logs into lumber, doing all the groundwork to build the pad . . . it’s hard to differentiate like, yes, putting in fence posts on our land next door to our house in the evenings is – it kind of feels like housework, but it’s also for her horse business.

For Paul and Wendy, the boundaries between work and home are collapsed; their home is a site of two businesses: a soon-to-be-built horse barn, and a home daycare. This makes it challenging for them to perceive and allocate how Paul should contribute inside the home, as well as what constitutes involvement in and responsibility for housework more generally. Paul perceives the work he does outside as contributing to responsibilities for housework. Although Wendy shares this perception, it does not negate her feeling of being overwhelmed from taking responsibility for so much of the housework indoors. Paul and Wendy’s story exemplifies the complexity of conceptualizing care-related work when the boundaries between work and home are blurred. It also points to the importance of socio-geographic context – specifically, differences between rural, suburban and urban families – when analysing allocations of tasks and responsibilities for care.

At other times, discrepancies between fathers’ estimation of their involvement in surveys compared with couple interviews may be attributed to attempts to reach a compromise. Steve and Trish, who both work in the public sector, have an eight-year-old son. Over the course of their interview, it was apparent that they made conscious attempts to keep childcare and housework evenly allocated between the two of them. Steve shared, ‘We strive to [both] do quite a bit around the house, to make sure that we’re sharing the burden.’ Their efforts to ‘share the burden’ was apparent in the ways they negotiated how responsibilities should be divvied up in the Care/Work Portrait. In his survey response, Steve indicated on the survey that he and Trish shared the responsibility for house cleaning evenly. But when asked during the couple interview how the overall responsibility for household cleaning was shared, the conversation began:

Steve: I think that’s shared. [Speaking to Trish:] You want to say mostly you right?

Trish: I want to say mostly me because it’s the cleaning. It’s not tidying. It’s like this is – I’m very sensitive to when the house is not sanitary.

Steve: I am really good at noticing it; I just don’t do a lot of the cleaning. That’s what I think is shared.

Trish: Yeah, but I’m like, ‘We need to do bathrooms this weekend.’ Right? Which to me is like planning for it.

Steve: We’ll give it mostly Trish.

In this instance, Steve acquiesces, either to avoid further disagreement, or because he is swayed to Trish’s point of view. Later in the interview, when asked how the responsibilities for house, car and yard repairs are allocated, Trish reciprocates, and is swayed over to Steve’s perspective regarding his role in responsibilities for household repairs:

Steve: That would be all me.

Trish: It’s all you or mostly you? It’s the house piece that gets me. Car and yard – no debate. House – I think –

Steve: When it’s planning, I would do more in the budgeting end of things and planning for when we’re going to do renovations or upkeep and that kind of thing. So that’s why I think it’s all me.

Trish: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s definitely strong on you. That’s fine. I’m okay with that.

Kim (Interviewer): So, where did we land?

Trish: I think it’s all Steve.

A similar dynamic plays out during our interview with Josh and Kelly. They both work as counsellors and have a six- and eight-year-old. Josh and Kelly have flexibility in terms of where they can work, though Kelly has a strong preference for working at her office, whereas Josh expressed that he is fine working at home. This meant that during pandemic-induced school and daycare closures, Josh was both working at home and looking after his children. In his survey response, Josh claimed to be mostly responsible for his kids in daily life. But when asked about how responsibility for childcare is shared on a day-to-day basis, Kelly replied:

Kelly: The kids are mostly in day care. But when we are arranging for childcare, it is predominantly me. So, if it’s arranging for childcare – not one of us doing it – I do it almost exclusively.

Josh: Yeah. So, like when I have them, I’m arranging my schedule with them, and then we’ll rearrange for somebody else and, yeah.

Kim (Interviewer): Okay. So where are we placing that one?

Josh: Shared, I guess. I would say shared.

Kelly: You would say it’s shared? Okay.

Josh: Yes. We disagree.

In this example, Kelly feels she is mostly responsible, while Josh persists in his perspective that he is primarily responsible for the kids’ daily lives. Claiming that the responsibility is shared, then, is a compromise they both reach to not get swept up in further debate.

We share one final example of a case where a father, Kevin, underestimated his contributions for housework and childcare responsibilities in his survey response, compared with what was discussed alongside his wife, Lisa. Kevin and Lisa have three children aged 11, 13 and 18. They work as project coordinators in the IT sector. Of all the fathers we interviewed, Kevin most frequently underestimated his involvement in tasks and responsibilities in his survey responses. In his survey responses, he underestimated his involvement in responsibilities for kids’ schooling and housework by indicating that it was mostly Lisa that handled these items. By contrast in the Care/Work Portrait interview with Lisa, they both agreed that these responsibilities were, in fact, shared evenly. To understand why Kevin may have underestimated his involvement, we offer the story he tells about his family upbringing:

Kevin: My dad was not a very active father. I could count the number of times on my hand that he came to my baseball or hockey games. So, I tend to be very active with the kids. I, for the most part, I tried to do a good job and being part of their lives and stuff like that. So, me and my dad, we didn’t have a great relationship growing up. It got better, obviously, as we get older, stuff like that.

Andrea (Interviewer): So that was a choice on your part, to want to be a different kind of father?

Kevin: Yeah, being an active father. And strangely enough, I can’t believe this conversation coming up now. But we just had a get together with me and my friends. And we kind of all didn’t have strong father figures. And I think that was kind of the allure – that’s what – we’re all friends since elementary school and high school and university, same set of friends. So, we still hang out. We’ve all done well ourselves, generally.

Here, Kevin is acknowledging that his decision to be an involved father was influenced by the absence of his own father when he was young. He and Lisa continue to reflect on his involvement, others’ perceptions and the low expectations placed on him:

Andrea (Interviewer): And did Lisa play a role in you becoming an active father?

Lisa: Yeah. I’m sure I gave him encouragement in the early days, but now he doesn’t need it. He has no problems . . . he’s the first one to volunteer to take the kids out or, you know, so no issues there.

Kevin: Yeah, and I don’t want to make this a racial thing, but we’re all Black and West Indie, and we tend to get a bad shake. We talked about this – I’ll just tell you this – back in the day, [our school was] predominantly Jewish and Italian. Sometimes, we run into our old friends from high school, and we tell them we have children. They always say, ‘Oh, with the same mum?’ And we find that very peculiar. Because what – we would never go to a Caucasian person say, if you told me, ‘Oh, you got five kids.’ My next question would not be ‘with the same mom?’ It’s just a weird question. Why? Why? Why? Is it because we’re Black or minority, that we tend to have children with different mothers? It strikes me the wrong way. I just want – as fathers, I’d like to do better.

Kevin’s reflections reveal how racialized assumptions about fatherhood shape both how he is perceived by others and how he evaluates himself. His account of conversations with longtime friends – Black and West Indian men – suggests that the ‘allure’ of active fatherhood is not only a personal ideal, but a collective aspiration rooted in shared experiences of loss and stigma. Kevin’s tendency to underestimate his care-giving contributions may reflect the influence of dominant scripts that devalue everyday fathering among racialized men. The couple interview with Lisa brings these dynamics into view, highlighting how care-giving roles are not only divided but co-constructed through affirmation and negotiation. In this way, couple interviews deepen our understanding of how care-giving is shaped by social locations and relational meanings.

Discussion and Conclusion

This project examines the methodological and epistemological tensions involved in measuring fathers’ contributions to household tasks and responsibilities. We posed two research questions: (1) To what extent do fathers’ individual survey responses align with the negotiated accounts in couple interviews? and (2) What does misalignment reveal about the cognitive and relational dimensions of domestic responsibility? We found that survey data and couple interview responses align closely for discrete, observable tasks, but diverge when it comes to responsibilities for childcare and housework, which are more cognitively demanding, relationally distributed and temporally diffuse. For example, a brief note on a calendar about a child’s ballet class may overlook months of research, coordination and decision making. This complexity explains the higher rates of disagreement about the division of such responsibilities. Notably, these disagreements were not contradictory but primarily centred on whether a task was done ‘mostly’ by one person or ‘shared equally’.

Our findings underscore the importance of selecting methodological approaches that align with the epistemological dimensions of the phenomenon under investigation. Surveys, rooted in positivist epistemologies, are well suited to capturing bounded, observable tasks such as laundry or meal preparation. These tasks have clear start and end points and are thus amenable to structured response formats. However, responsibilities, particularly those that entail planning, anticipating and managing others’ needs, reside within interpretive frameworks of meanings, memories and social contexts. Our couple interviews show that these responsibilities, unlike tasks, are relational processes that span multiple spatialities and temporalities, are often experienced differently across individuals and are shaped by their social location and lived experiences, including gender, race and class. As such, studying responsibilities calls for qualitative methods that foreground meaning making and reflexivity.

Couple interviews also allow for the co-construction of narratives between partners, illuminating the relational dynamics that underlie survey responses. For example, Paul’s perception that building a barn constituted housework emerged only through dialogic interaction with Wendy, revealing how rurality, gendered labour and entrepreneurial aspirations intersect to shape domestic allocations of labour. Similarly, Kevin’s underestimation of his care-giving role was clarified through discussion of his family history and encounters with racialized assumptions about fatherhood. These examples suggest that misalignment is not simply a measurement error, but a window into how responsibilities are understood, framed and embodied. The interviews also deepen our understanding of how individuals negotiate self-concepts within relationships, offering insights into how couples perceive and advocate for each other’s contributions, as well as how they challenge or redefine shared responsibilities, as seen with Steve and Trish, and Josh and Kelly.

Couple interviews, while illustrative, also have limitations. Power imbalances may be obscured, as individuals defer to one another or seek to avoid conflict (Reczek, 2014; Valentine, 1999). We attended to this dynamic by paying attention, in the video interviews and analysis, not only to their words, but to their body language and facial expressions. However, we acknowledge that couples sometimes withhold or selectively disclose information about their family lives and indeed, some couples with high levels of tension or dissatisfaction with their household division of labour may choose not to participate in interview studies (Twamley, 2024). Future research can incorporate individual interviews to triangulate accounts and better understand the dynamics that couple interviews may mask.

Additional limitations relate to whose perspectives are included, and how. First, as our survey data did not include the linked responses of couples, we were only able to compare fathers’ survey responses with what was discussed in couple interviews. Although this suited our theoretical interest in centring fathers’ involvement in responsibilities for housework and childcare, we acknowledge that it would have been ideal to consider mothers’ survey responses as well. Moreover, self-reported survey responses are susceptible to recall bias and social desirability effects. While our interviews asked participants to reflect on past and current arrangements, their retrospective nature may be subject to narrative reconstruction. Future research should incorporate dyadic survey data and longitudinal methods to better capture change over time.

Despite these limitations, our mixed methods approach illustrates how epistemological pluralism can enhance our understanding of household tasks and responsibilities. Rather than resolving methodological tensions, our study foregrounds them as productive. It is precisely because surveys and interviews capture different dimensions of social life that their combination yields insight. From a conceptual perspective, this aligns with feminist epistemologies that reject the search for a single, objective truth in favour of situated, relational knowledge (Doucet, 2018).

Attention to household and care responsibilities is increasing, even in quantitative survey data (Ciciolla and Luthar, 2019; Haupt and Gelbgiser, 2024; Offer, 2014; Wayne et al., 2023). Our view, rooted in methodological pluralism and philosophical pragmatism, is that positivist methodologies and epistemologies can offer data from wide and large populations, and findings that speak to multiple audiences and thus are critical for advancing policy efforts towards gender equality. At the same time, it is important to develop broad insights about how divisions and relations of childcare and housework responsibilities are perceived, allocated and experienced. Such insights, gleaned from qualitative research, can deepen our understanding of the links between domestic labour and parental physical and mental well-being outcomes.

Our findings offer several implications for policy. First, they suggest that if parental leave policies can be extended and made non-transferable, this can encourage fathers’ active engagement in planning and coordinating care, not just in completing tasks. Second, organizations can normalize and support flexible work arrangements that accommodate care-giving responsibilities as dynamic and ongoing. Third, initiatives such as employer-sponsored parental coaching or mental load workshops can help make invisible responsibilities more legible within families and organizations.

In closing, we note that it was clear from our research interviews that participants had heard about or read about the mental load or invisible labour. ⁷ Most of them nodded, smiled or even laughed when we mentioned it. As public discussion about responsibilities for housework and childcare becomes more common, we may find that couples’ perspectives on ‘who does what’ become more synergistic. Yet charting a path from discursive recognition to behavioural change is neither singular, nor automatic, nor linear. Future research should examine whether, how and under what conditions shifts in norms surrounding the mental load translate into sustained changes in care-giving practices. In the meantime, we contend that efforts to identify generalizable patterns in the allocation of household and care responsibilities are augmented and contextualized by multiple methodologies, including and especially in-depth couple interviews.

Biography

Kim de Laat is an Assistant Professor of Organization and Human Behaviour at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, University of Waterloo. As a sociologist specializing in work and culture, her research explores inequality and uncertainty within creative and knowledge-based organizations. Dr de Laat investigates the dynamics of who performs work, when and where it is carried out, and under what conditions, focusing particularly on remote and hybrid work arrangements and their implications for gender inequality. Her scholarship has appeared in leading journals, including Community, Work and Family; Cultural Sociology; ILR Review; New Technology, Work and Employment; Poetics; Socio-Economic Review; Work, Employment and Society; and Work and Occupations. She is the Principal Investigator of the SSHRC-funded Insight Development Grant, ‘Hybrid Work Arrangements and Cognitive Labour: Implications for Gender Inequality at Work and Home’. You can find her on Bluesky: @kdelaat.bsky.social

Andrea Doucet is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brock University, an Honorary Professor at University College London (UCL) and a former Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Gender, Work and Care. Her most recent books are the second edition of the award-winning book Do Men Mother? (University of Toronto Press, 2018), Thinking Ecologically, Thinking Responsibly (co-edited with Nancy Arden McHugh, SUNY Press, 2021) and two new books: Care Leaves and Care Time for All (co-authored with Peter Moss, Policy Press, 2026) and The Routledge International Handbook on the Listening Guide Method (co-edited with Carol Gilligan and Natasha Mauthner, Routledge, 2026). She is the Project Director and Principal Investigator of the SSHRC Partnership programme, Reimaging Care/Work Policies and Co-Coordinator of the International Network of Leave Policies and Research. You can learn more about her work at andreadoucet.com. Her Bluesky handle is @andreadoucet.bsky.social