Children's Developmental Outcomes in Cohabiting Unions

描述（由申请人提供）：迄今为止，我的研究主要集中在同居联盟中的成年人福祉。拟议的项目将使我能够扩大我的研究议程，调查同居家庭的家庭过程和质量及其对儿童和青少年福祉的影响。人口学家在分析个人福祉时，迟迟没有将这些因素纳入分析，而是将重点放在更大的结构性因素上。然而，人口和发展的观点实际上是相辅相成的，因为它们共同强调家庭环境的个人、过程和背景质量，所有这些都塑造了儿童的福祉。我将考虑家庭环境在个人、过程和背景层面（包括父母的心理健康、养育行为、亲子关系质量、经济资源和家庭不稳定性）对同居家庭青年发展的重要性，特别关注贫困和少数民族地位带来的并发症。 我将使用1992-2002年的项目动态调查和三波全国青少年健康纵向研究的数据来研究家庭过程和质量对儿童发展的五个核心领域的影响：（1）身体，（2）心理和情感，（3）社会，（4）认知和教育，（5）经济福祉。这两个数据集都允许我解释先前的生活安排过渡以及当前家庭形式的持续时间。计量经济学技术将用于解释选择效应。我还将对同居父母进行深入采访，以扩大我从SPD和Add Health获得的结果。这一战略将使我能够更详细地探索与儿童福祉联系最紧密的因素，并确定在二级数据分析中没有检查的家庭环境的其他关键方面。 K-01奖将为我提供强有力的指导和儿童和青少年发展以及计量经济学和定性方法的专业培训，这将使我能够扩大我对同居和幸福的人口研究。从发展的角度来看，我 将更有能力解决新出现的家庭结构，如同居，如何以及为什么影响儿童的生活。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): My research to date has focused on adult well-being in cohabiting unions. The proposed project will allow me to expand my research agenda to investigate the family processes and qualities of cohabiting families and their implications for child and adolescent well-being. Demographers have been slow to integrate these elements in their analyses of individual well-being, focusing instead on larger structural factors. Nevertheless, the demographic and developmental perspectives actually are complementary as together they emphasize the individual, process, and contextual qualities of the family environment, all of which shape children's well-being. I will consider the significance of the family environment at the person, process, and context levels (including parental psychological well-being, parenting behaviors, parent-child relationship quality, economic resources, and family instability) for the development of youth in cohabiting families, paying special attention to the complications presented by poverty and minority status. I will use data from the 1992-2002 Survey of Program Dynamics and the three waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine the influence of family processes and qualities on five core domains of children's development: (1) physical, (2) psychological and emotional, (3) social, (4) cognitive and educational, and (5) economic well-being. Both of these data sets permit me to account for prior living arrangement transitions as well as duration in the current family form. Econometric techniques will be use to account for selection effects. I will also conduct in-depth interviews with cohabiting parents to expand on the results I obtain from the SPD and Add Health. This strategy will allow me to explore in greater detail the factors that are most strongly linked to child well-being and identify other key aspects of the family environment that were not examined in the secondary data analyses. The K-01 award will provide me with strong mentorship and specialized training in child and adolescent development as well as econometrics and qualitative methods, which will enable me to expand my demographic research on cohabitation and well-being. By incorporating a developmental perspective, I will be better equipped to address how and why newly emerging family structures such as cohabitation influence children's lives.