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Expert Panel Workshop Discussion
With these limitations in mind, ACF convened a one-day workshop that brought together a wide range of experts to discuss how the utility of the NLSY97 data might be strengthened for research on marriage and the family. Attendees included both individuals with extensive experience using the NLSY97 data and members of the NLSY97 design team, as well as experts within the marriage and family formation arena who are typically less familiar with the NSLY data base. The workshop focused primarily on the four topical areas already noted:
- Pathways to cohabitation and marriage
- Relationship between family formation/marital status and employment
- Marriage outcomes
- Child well-being in different family structures
A panel discussion was held on each topic, focusing first on what important substantive questions remained unanswered. Building on this, workshop members then discussed the data limitations within the NLSY97 that have particular relevance to these questions and the steps that would offer the greatest promise for addressing them. Workshop participants were asked to suggest small, medium and large-scale targets of opportunity for enhancing the utility of the NLSY97 with respect to these topics. Below are the major themes that emerged from the discussions. As the four topical areas listed above are inter-related, many of the discussion themes raised by the group came up during more than one panel; for brevity, they are summarized only once.
Pathways to Cohabitation and Marriage
The longitudinal nature of the NLSY97, along with its event history module, provides for a detailed tracking of individuals into and out of cohabiting and marital relationships. The same level of detail on important covariates such as fertility, employment and public assistance receipt allow researchers to study the associations among these outcomes, based on the appropriate sequencing of events and temporal relationships.
While workshop participants agreed that the event history data provided an excellent opportunity to track relationship pathways, they felt the data would be stronger with the addition of direct survey questions on key transitional events. One cited example was to ask a respondent directly if she was already pregnant when she married her partner. Another was to enhance the ability to track pathways by further work in defining cohabitation, e.g., measures that would distinguish between cohabitors who clearly saw themselves on a pathway toward marriage versus those who did not.
In addition to tracking and defining relationship pathways, participants discussed the field’s ability to understand factors influencing these pathways. They agreed that while the sequencing of events was a critical piece of this picture, important contextual factors were missing from the data. These include measures of the local environment, normative measures among peer groups, participation in or awareness of marriage education programs, and reasons for not engaging in such activities as marriage or parenthood.
Relationship between Family Formation/Marital Status and Employment
The extent to which employment fosters marriage opportunities or marriage fosters employment gains has been extensively studied in earlier cohorts of the NLSY and, as mentioned above, can be studied in detail with the NLSY97 as well. However, workshop participants felt that in addition to looking at the connection between marriage and employment, a third element of this dynamic—that of resource and power sharing—was much less understood and missing from the NLSY97 data. The extent to which employment and earnings patterns influence these sharing dynamics, and the interconnections between these dynamics and marriage, remains a largely unanswered question that could be addressed with the NLSY97 given a few additional measures. Participants also felt it would be valuable to have more measures documenting efforts in or difficulties associated with balancing work and family life, and measures of financial literacy.
Marriage Outcomes
During this panel, workshop participants discussed outstanding questions and data issues pertaining to the marital relationship itself, including measures of relationship quality, stability and commitment, as well as parental interactions with children. The NLSY97 contains a rich array of variables measuring the quality of relationship between the youth’s parents and interactions between youth and parent (both residential and nonresidential), as well as the quality of relationship between the youth and his or her partner in adulthood. This information includes both objective measures based on particular behaviors and subjective measures such as levels of satisfaction.
In addition to these measures of quality, workshop participants talked extensively about the importance of assessing relationship skills, which currently are not captured in the NLSY97 data. There was a strong shared sense that such measures would be valuable to understanding family processes and informing healthy marriage interventions. The specific suggestions for possible directions to take were quite varied, suggesting that additional discussions and conceptual work would be a necessary first step.
In terms of relationship stability, participants noted that while the duration of relationships can be tracked over time, measures of relationship security at a given point in time are lacking. Participants suggested that adding measures of perceived relationship exit costs, shared goals for the future, and worries over infidelity could help address this gap. Domestic violence was also identified as a critical domain that is completely absent from the NLSY97 data. The data could be further enhanced, participants felt, by gathering all measures--existing and newly proposed--from the perspectives of both partners rather than just one.
Child Well-Being in Different Family Structures
The NLSY97 data provide a significant opportunity to study the relationship between family structure and child well-being, owing to the extensive range of youth well-being measures (including outcomes related to health, education and risk-taking behaviors), the variety of structures within which the youth are raised (e.g., single versus two parent, biological versus step parent, married versus unmarried parent), and retrospective variables that document how much time the youth’s parents spent in each type of relationship.
As family structure becomes more complex, however, it intersects with child well-being in a number of ways that are not adequately captured in the NLSY97 data. Most notably, workshop participants felt that more information was needed on interactions outside the household, particularly regarding time the youth spent with nonresidential parents, social parents or extended family members. On a related note, panelists stated the importance of having a more complete rostering of parental/child relationships both inside and outside the household, including the relationships between a parent’s partner and each child as well as the presence of the partner’s children outside the household.
In addition to being able to assess how child well-being is affected by a complex family landscape, studying how it changes over the lifecourse is equally important and complicated. As the longitudinal cohort of the NLSY97 enters young adulthood and, for many, parenthood, it is well positioned to study this dynamic as their children age.
However, measures of their parenting activities and their children’s well-being have yet to be developed, and this will be a critical next step.
The NLSY97 also offers the opportunity to study this dynamic over the course of the youth’s childhood as it relates to changes in their own parents’ relationship status, based on the relationship history information provided by parents in round 1 of the survey. To fully realize this potential of the data, however, the panel noted that additional measures would be needed to capture earlier points in the youth’s childhood, both in terms of the youth’s well-being and as covariates for the parents that may have jointly influenced family well-being and family formation.
Cross-Cutting Themes
In addition to issues related to the four topical areas described above, other themes were addressed that were clearly of broad relevance to nearly any NLSY research on marriage and the family. These include the value of: repackaging the existing data and documentation to make it more transparent and usable to policy researchers; supplementing the sample to reflect new waves of immigration; and the creation of new cohorts, possibly a sample of children born to youth of the NLSY97 cohort or a new cross section of youth in 2010.
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