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Child Well-Being and Lone Parenthood Across the OECD

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Family Well-Being

Part of the book series: Social Indicators Research Series ((SINS,volume 49))

Abstract

This chapter uses a simple meta-analysis to assess the impact of being in a lone parent family on a variety of dimensions of child well-being, drawing on a wide cross-country, cross-OECD sample of effect sizes. It considers how effect sizes vary by country, estimation method, type of data, outcome, age and sex. It uses this information to draw out some general policy conclusions regarding lone parent family structures arising out of a rapidly developing body of work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This study does not consider the issue of whether lone parenthood impacts adversely on the household income to which children are exposed. There is a literature on child poverty statics and dynamics across the OECD which usually look at tabulations of family structure (amongst other things), including lone parent family structure, against income poverty transitions. There is also a smaller literature on lone parent family structure and material living standards. For reasons of space, this literature is not further considered.

  2. 2.

    This conclusion has been deduced from the reference list in Amato (2000a), where five out of the 67 studies are definitely from outside the United States. Some of the remaining 62 studies may also rely on non-United States data, though this is difficult to establish without a detailed article-by-article examination. Unfortunately, no separate data or detail is presented in the article to allow examination of variation of effect sizes between different countries included in the sample.

  3. 3.

    Hill et al. (2001, pp. 273–276) provide a well-referenced summary which divides the theories in three broad streams – “stress theory”, “social control theory” and “economic hardship theory”.

  4. 4.

    See Chinn (2000) for some useful examples for calculating effect sizes from odds ratios and logit and probit estimation.

  5. 5.

    Two Norwegian researchers, Breivik and Olweus (2006, p. 61), observe “[a] fairly common view holds that children’s risks of negative outcomes associated with family dissolution are generally small or nonexistent in Scandinavia and clearly smaller than what is usually found in the United States”.

  6. 6.

    Amato (2005) also calculates mean weight effect sizes, which weights the individual effect size by its sample size. This method provides a better estimate of the effect size in the population. This weighting was not done here because of the significant number of studies which did not report the population sizes of the treatment and control groups. However, it is noteworthy that in Amato’s study, this reduced effect sizes by domain by between one third and one half. There is no reason to believe that a similar reduction would not occur if the non-United States OECD data were re-weighted, again suggesting further upward bias in the effect sizes reported here.

  7. 7.

    Recall Amato (2000a) does not consider adult outcomes. Young adult outcomes are however considered in relationship to lone parenthood in Amato (1999).

  8. 8.

    There is some evidence of stabilisation and even recent decline in proportions of lone parents, for example, in New Zealand.

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Professor Maria Bacikova-Sleskova for undertaking a special run of her Slovak data set for this study on request (Sleskova et al. 2006). I also thank my colleagues Mark Pearson and Willem Adema for their useful comments. The usual disclaimers apply.

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    Simon Chapple

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Chapple, S. (2013). Child Well-Being and Lone Parenthood Across the OECD. In: Moreno Minguez, A. (eds) Family Well-Being. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 49. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4354-0_5

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