Abstract
Multiple-partner fertility (MPF) occurs when a person has biological children with more than one partner. The 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), a nationally representative panel study of individuals and households in the United States, is the first such survey to include a direct question about whether respondents are MPF parents. Understanding the prevalence of such families is important given the known socioeconomic correlates of MPF and the ramifications of entering MPF for both individuals and families. In this study, the new SIPP data are used to generate key benchmarks for a national sample, present subpopulation estimates, and describe the sample of adults with children by multiple partners.
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Notes
These data are released to inform interested parties of ongoing research and to encourage discussion. Any views expressed on statistical, methodological, technical, or operational issues are those of the author and not necessarily those of the U.S. Census Bureau.
In these data, adults are defined as individuals aged 15 or older.
The data are subject to error arising from a variety of sources. More information on sampling and nonsampling error is available online (https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/sipp/tech-documentation/source-accuracy-statements/2014/sipp-2014-source-and-accuracy-statement.pdf).
Additional information about the SIPP, its sampling frame, and its weights is available online (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/sipp/methodology.html). Weights in the SIPP include an equivalency adjustment for spouses but not for cohabiting couples.
These estimates replicate those found in Monte (2017b).
The estimates presented in Table 1 use the population aged 15 and older to represent adults. This means that adolescent parents who live with both their own children and their own parents may be represented twice in these tabulations: (1) as parents of their own minor children and (2) as minor children of their own parents. Such a household would be considered to contain two separate families.
In single-parent families, in which there is no coresident spouse or partner, MPF estimates are limited to the resident parent.
Unfortunately, the nature of the SIPP survey prohibits parental MPF estimates for a nationally representative population of children. Because the survey asks about the fertility of resident parents only, the data do not allow for complete measures of parental fertility for children who do not live with both biological parents. The online appendix contains some limited estimates for children in the SIPP, but researchers should use them with caution because they are constrained by the limitations of the data and cannot be presumed to reflect the prevalence of MPF for all children.
The estimates presented here include only those estimates to which the SIPP can be most reliably compared. Although many studies have used the Fragile Families data set (see, e.g., Carlson and Furstenberg 2006; Monte 2011a), that data set follows the parents of a birth cohort born between 1998 and 2000. Because the SIPP is not designed to estimate MPF from a child’s perspective, parallel estimates are problematic. Similarly, the SIPP cannot be compared with estimates drawn from state-level samples (e.g., Cancian et al. 2011; Monte 2011b) because the SIPP sample size is not sufficient to provide subnational estimates.
All comparative statements reported here have undergone statistical testing, and unless otherwise noted, all comparisons are statistically significant at the 5 % significance level.
Even with these adjustments, the samples likely still differ in that the samples for the prior estimates almost certainly include respondents who died after the end of their data collection but prior to the 2014 SIPP interview. Unfortunately, these comparative estimates cannot be adjusted to account for these deaths.
Black alone is used here to describe individuals who identify as only one race: black. White alone and Asian alone are similarly defined. All other single-race identifications, as well as individuals who identify as more than one race, are represented in the All other group.
Hispanic origin is measured independent of race.
Given that most parents do not have additional children after age 40, 40 is often used as the minimum threshold for completed fertility (Monte and Ellis 2014).
The SIPP provides multiple measures of poverty. In this article, I use household poverty—measured by combining the income of all persons in the household, regardless of relationship, and comparing it against the federal poverty line for a household of that size—because family poverty measures do not include the income of cohabiting partners. Given the prevalence of MPF in cohabiting families, the household poverty measures—which include everyone living in a residence—are believed to be a more complete representation of these households’ economic well-being. Given that only 5.6 % of the 2014 SIPP sample live in extended-family households or with nonrelatives, this more inclusive measure seems unlikely to bias estimates (Schondelmyer 2017).
Not all respondents had completed their fertility at the time of that survey; for some of these respondents, the last observed birth may not ultimately be their last birth.
Because of data constraints, only opposite-sex couples are included in measures of shared childbearing in unions.
Given the known correlation between incarceration and MPF, and assuming that the SIPP sample represents a best-case scenario with regard to a population with a criminal history, I treat the percentage of previously incarcerated SIPP respondents with MPF (36 %) as a lower bound. The theoretical maximum of an upper bound would be that all prisoners have MPF, or a prevalence of 100 %. Recent estimates suggest that roughly one-half of prisoners are parents to minor children (Glaze and Maruschak 2008), and so the percentage who are parents to children of any age is undoubtedly higher; nonetheless, these estimates suggest that presuming 100 % MPF is an unlikely extreme but useful for this parametrization exercise.
Table A1 in the online appendix shows some limited estimates of the prevalence of MPF for children who live with both parents; however, these estimates are by no means representative of all children or all families.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. I am additionally grateful to all of the anonymous SIPP respondents who made this work possible.
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Monte, L.M. Multiple-Partner Fertility in the United States: A Demographic Portrait. Demography 56, 103–127 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0743-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0743-y