Introduction

An increasing number of parents are today turning to the internet for information on children and parenting (Daneback and Plantin, 2008). Many are also living part of their family lives, and forming their identities as parents, in various chat forums and online communities and on social media (Plantin and Daneback, 2009). Against this background, the number of sites specifically directed at parents has grown substantially over the past decade. These sites provide opportunities to access large quantities of information on parenting from public sector agencies and experts, but first and foremost, they provide the opportunity for parents to share and obtain experience-based information among themselves. It has been found, however, that many of these sites attract mothers to a greater extent than fathers (Sarkadi and Bremberg, 2005; Pedersen and Smithson, 2013), while more fathers instead appear to be active on social media such as Facebook and various blog sites. Statistics on parents’ use of social media show, for example, that a majority of American fathers with internet access use Facebook on a daily basis, and almost half of these state that this provides useful parenting information (Pew Research Center, 2015). New fathers in particular appear to be active on Facebook, where they establish contacts with other parents, post pictures of their children and develop an important source of social support in their parenting (Bartholomew et al, 2012).

The internet has thus become a very interesting arena for studying how fatherhood is expressed and modelled online, as well as a source for other forms of data collection. It provides opportunities to quickly and simply collect large-scale questionnaire data, to conduct interviews or focus groups, to conduct ethnographic studies of discussions in various chat forums, or to follow the reflections of individual fathers on parenthood via blogs or personal web pages. The internet also provides the opportunity to collect large amounts of data on specific groups of fathers that are too small to study in the context of more broadly focused surveys. The internet opens up a world populated by fathers who are visible, and who can be reached and observed. But what characterises the fatherhood research that makes use of the internet to develop an improved knowledge of fathers?