“Fathers Are Very Important, but They Aren’t Our Contact Persons”: The Primary Contact Person Assumption and the Absence of Fathers in Social Work Interventions

Research on the engagement of fathers in family- and child-oriented social work interventions has focused on individual factors relating to the father, to the mother, or the social worker. Much less attention has been paid to the impact of organizational aspects of the social services themselves. This article uses the methodology of institutional ethnography to examine this impact on the engagement of fathers in those services provided by municipal Departments of Social Services in Israel. We found that service delivery was structured by the primary contact person assumption—that one person should be designated as the primary contact in the routine course of an intervention. Together with gendered, political, and cultural factors that support preference for the mother, this structuring assumption results in a full or partial exclusion of fathers from family- and child-oriented interventions.