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Family structure and child outcomes: a high definition, wide angle “snapshot”

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Abstract

Using data from the National Survey of America’s Families (NSAF), this research investigates the relationships between a highly defined set of family structures and a broad set of child outcomes at a particular point in time in a child’s life. A detailed classification of family structures is constructed that clarifies key differences among various types of diverse families, and facilitates equivalencies testing and pairwise comparisons across nontraditional family structures. The NSAF contains a large number of observations for less common, but growing, family structures such as single-father families, grandparent-headed households and cohabiters, which makes such detailed analyses feasible and allows further stratification by child age, gender and race. The data also contains information on child behavioral, educational and physical health outcomes, as well as extensive household characteristics, economic resources and parental behaviors and inputs. Results suggest that differences across nontraditional family structures are particularly prominent for child health outcomes and that the gender of the resident parent is empirically important, more so than the presence of a cohabiting or married step-parent. Children in single father families have lesser access to health care yet enjoy better health outcomes than those in other families, even after controlling for economic resources (and inputs). In contrast, few differences are found between grandparent-headed families and other non-parent families. While we explore alternative explanations for these results, our cross-sectional data and complex set of family structure variables preclude isolating causal relationships; instead, our analyses yield empirically important distinctions that point to promising avenues for future research.

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Notes

  1. Dawson (1991) and Hanson (1999) also study a wide set of outcomes, including measures of physical health, but explore a limited set of family structures. Ermisch and Francesconi (2001) include ‘health’ outcomes but their measures consist of ‘distress,’ a measure of mental health, and smoking behavior. No measures of physical health are included.

  2. Longitudinal data is clearly superior in this regard in that it allows one to explore the effects of a change in family structure as well as the time spent in each type. However such data rarely, if ever, contains enough observations to permit such a high definition of family structures, much less further stratifications by age, gender or race.

  3. Our working paper, available online at http://pubpages.unh.edu/~ksconway/Selected%20Publications.htm, includes a more expanded presentation of past research and of the empirical analyses summarized in Sects. 4, 5, 6.

  4. Empirically, we treat households with two adoptive parents as if they were biological parents—i.e., a traditional household. When only one parent is biological, we treat the household as a blended household and treat adoptive, step and ‘other’ parents/partners as equivalent and instead focus on whether the couple is cohabiting or married. We treat households with only one adoptive parent (and no biological one) similarly. Same-sex couples are extremely rare in our sample with only 73 observations and none report being parents of the child; these families are therefore classified as ‘other non-parent.’ As noted in Sect. 4, our results are robust to dropping same-sex couples and all cases of ‘adoptive’ parents.

  5. NSAF surveyed one child from the 0-5 age group and one child from the 6–17 age group; if there was more than one child in an age group, one was chosen randomly. Thus, using within family differences as in Francesconi et al. 2010 is not possible.

  6. The scale was created by Jim Connell and Lisa Bridges at the Institute for Research and Reform in Education in California. The MKA is asked how often does the child (1) care about doing well in school, (2) only work on schoolwork when forced to, (3) just do enough schoolwork to get by, and (4) always do homework. Values are assigned from all of the time (=4) to none of the time (=1) and negative measures are reverse coded.

  7. Examples include how often the child feels worthless or inferior, been nervous or tense, cannot concentrate, been sad or depressed, does not get along with other kids, acts too young for age, has trouble sleeping, lies or cheats, or does poorly at school. Responses are often true (=3), sometimes true (=2) and never true (=1).

  8. Chow tests support pooling the 1999 and 2002 data, a helpful finding given the rarity of some of the family structures.

  9. Family income is a categorical variable expressed as a percentage of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL). It includes alimony and child support payments as well as any other regular contribution from persons not living in the household.

  10. These scales are derived by summing the MKA’s responses to questions about difficulty he/she was having with the child to create an ‘aggravation’ index and about his/her feelings (e.g., feeling nervous, downhearted, down in the dumps) for a mental health index. Higher scores indicate greater aggravation and better mental health.

  11. Sampling methods in the NSAF require using survey weights, which makes calculating these measures less straightforward. Standard deviations are calculated with post-estimation command estat sd after svy, subpop(): mean in Stata 11.

  12. Note that none of the hypotheses are rejected for the current health measure for ages 12–17 when model c is specified. Also, all of the test results are very similar when nonlinear methods of estimation (e.g., ordered probit) are used.

  13. This conclusion is verified by performing the pairwise comparisons in Table 3 for the input equations. Married stepmother families frequently are significantly associated with greater health care inputs than other bio-father families.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Reagan Baughman, Robert Mohr and Robert Woodward for their helpful comments and to the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, and the NSAF Small Research Grants Program funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, for financial support. All remaining errors are own.

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  1. Department of Economics, University of New Hampshire, McConnell Hall, 15 Academic Way, Durham, NH, 03824, USA

    Karen Smith Conway

  2. Business Administration Division, Franklin Pierce University, 40 University Drive, Rindge, NH, 03461, USA

    Minghua Li

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Correspondence to Karen Smith Conway.

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Conway, K.S., Li, M. Family structure and child outcomes: a high definition, wide angle “snapshot”. Rev Econ Household 10, 345–374 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-011-9121-x

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