Experts are just coming to grips with the consequences of the recession for American workers and their families, including the characteristics of workers (and families) who were hurt most. We know, for example, that the recession was harder on men than women. In particular, the increase in the unemployment rate was higher for men than it was for women, and this has been true in every recession since the early 1980s. After being laid off, more men left the labor force than women, and it took longer for unemployed men to find new jobs than it took unemployed women. We also know that employment and earnings of younger workers and minorities fell more sharply than employment and earnings among older and white workers. Studies also show that the lower-income and less-educated workers suffered more-severe consequences than higher income and more-educated workers.

But we do not know if nonresident fathers and their families suffered more or less than other fathers or other men. One way to answer this question is to focus on the characteristics of nonresident fathers in relation to those of other fathers or other men. Even this is difficult because collecting data on nonresident fathers is so difficult.

Society expects (and the law requires) nonresident fathers to support their children financially. Therefore, men who fail to support their children tend to deny that they are nonresident fathers. This results in three kinds of distortions in the picture of nonresident fathers that emerges from large surveys: first, the surveys miss nonresident fathers; second, those surveyed tend to be better off with those hidden who are more economically vulnerable; third, the accounts of nonresident fathers are sometimes tainted by a mother's feelings. For all these reasons, interviews conducted by researchers who persuade nonresident fathers that they will not be criticized or penalized for their failure to support their children financially are important ways to fill out what we learn about nonresident fathers from large national surveys and census data.

Researchers at the University of Bowling Green tried to assess the most accurate source of large survey information about nonresident fathers. They looked at three large national surveys, two of which asked men two questions: (1) if they were nonresident fathers, and (2) if they provided financial support for their nonresident children. In both surveys the second question immediately follows the first question. The third survey, called the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), asked men the same two questions, but at very different points in the survey interview. Estimates of the number of nonresident fathers from NSFG were substantially larger than estimates from the two other surveys. According to the survey, which was undertaken between 2006 and 2010, there were almost nine million nonresident fathers in the United States in the years bracketing the recent recession. After reproducing this estimate, we analyzed NSFG data on men to understand how nonresident fathers differed from resident fathers and other men in terms of the characteristics likely to influence how vulnerable they were to the recession.