The Intergenerational Transmission of Family Instability

描述（由申请人提供）：1996年的《个人责任与工作机会和解法》是第一部明确促进婚姻和鼓励形成双亲家庭的联邦法律。从那时起，拟议的立法已拨出超过15亿美元，鼓励各州设计鼓励和支持健康婚姻的项目。这样做的一个主要动机是相信家庭不稳定会对儿童产生负面影响。在这种情况下，意识形态得到了社会科学研究的支持，这些研究表明，生活在另类家庭（即单亲家庭、继父母家庭）确实会给孩子带来影响未来的风险。尚不清楚的是，为什么父母这一代的家庭不稳定会影响孩子这一代的幸福，包括孩子自己未来的婚姻轨迹。是家庭不稳定的实际经历导致了孩子生活机会的差异，还是母亲选择孩子进入这些家庭结构的特征，还是两者兼而有之？拟议的项目通过以下方式解决这些问题：1)研究家庭不稳定和相关的母亲特征对儿童中期适应的贡献；2)研究家庭内部动态在解释家庭不稳定和相关的母亲特征的影响中的作用；3)探索家庭不稳定、母亲选择特征和青少年适应如何共同影响到成年期的过渡，从而预测儿童一代不稳定的家庭。为此，我们将使用一套回归技术（路径分析，事件历史分析）对来自NICHD早期儿童保育和青少年发展研究（SECCYD）的队列进行分析，这是一项前瞻性出生队列研究，收集了家庭过程的详细测量，儿童适应的最新测量，以及从出生到三年级超过20次的家庭名册信息，以及国家青少年健康纵向研究（Add Health）。1995年的一项全国代表性的青少年研究，跟踪年轻人从成年过渡到成年，包括对家庭不稳定的回顾性测量，以及结合形成的期望和行为。通过利用包括丰富措施和涵盖生命早期过程的数据集，该项目的研究结果将更清楚地了解导致家庭不稳定代际传递的因素，从而为家庭政策提供信息。家庭的不稳定密切影响着儿童的机会和生活机会，在人口层面上，与美国儿童之间日益加剧的不平等有关。随着家庭结构的变化成为美国儿童的普遍特征，了解家庭不稳定是如何代代相传的，可以为旨在改善儿童福祉的政策和干预计划提供信息。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was the first federal law to explicitly promote marriage and encourage the formation of two-parent families. Since then, proposed legislation has earmarked more than $1.5 billion to encourage states to design programs that encourage and support healthy marriage. A primary motivation for this is a belief that family instability negatively affects children. In this case, ideology is backed by social science research, which suggests that residing in alternative families (i.e., single parent, stepparent) does pose risks for children in ways that shape their futures. What remains less clear is why family instability in the parent generation affects well-being in the child generation, including children's own future marital trajectories. Is it the actual experience of family instability that is responsible for differences in children's life chances, characteristics of the mother that select children into these family structures, or a combination of both? The proposed project addresses these issues by: 1) examining the contribution of both family instability and related maternal characteristics to adjustment in middle childhood, 2) investigating the role in intra-family dynamics in explaining the effects of both family instability and related maternal characteristics, and 3) exploring how family instability, maternal selection characteristics, and youth adjustment come together to shape the transition to adulthood in ways that forecast unstable families in the child generation. To do this, we will use a set of regression techniques (path analysis, event history analysis) on cohorts drawn from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), a prospective birth cohort study that collected detailed measures of family processes, state of the art measures of child adjustment, and household roster information more than 20 times from birth to 3rd grade, and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative study of adolescence in 1995 that follows young people through the transition to adulthood and includes retrospective measures of family instability as well as union formation expectations and behaviors. By leveraging data sets that include rich measures and cover the early life course, findings from this project will provide a clearer picture of the factors that drive the intergenerational transmission of family instability, which will inform family policy. Family instability intimately shapes the opportunities and life chances of children and, at the population level, is associated with rising inequality among American children. Understanding how family instability is transmitted across generations can inform policy and intervention programs designed to ameliorate child well- being as family structure change becomes a ubiquitous feature of American childhood.