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Overview
Introduction
While the scope of research on marriage and family formation has expanded greatly since the 1970s, the basic need to understand how families are doing, what challenges they face, and what helps them thrive will continue to be important. Marriage-related studies have evolved from merely tracking trends, to describing pathways into relationships and parenthood, to analyzing influences on child well-being and informing the Healthy Marriage Initiative. As a result, the field today covers an array of related topics including marriage, the wider spectrum of family structures, fatherhood, community resources, social networks, and the role of policy and programs as they relate to family well-being. There is a growing body of research showing how each domain influences family well-being directly and is vital in its own right. However, in combination they influence family well-being in interactive ways that are still not fully understood, for example how some elements mitigate or magnify the influence of others and how their relative importance varies over the life course.
Policy makers and researchers need to better understand how these dimensions of the family context intersect, and what this implies for developing policies and programs to strengthen families. To help achieve this, we need data that track individuals into relationships and parenthood; examine interactions among family members inside and outside the household; describe family resources, stressors and well-being along multiple dimensions and points in time; catalogue program participation; and capture a wide array of related covariates. In addition, we need data that will allow for examination of the roles and implications of these factors among different understudied populations such as low-income families and racial and ethnic minority groups.
This paper discusses the richness of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 Cohort (NLSY97) for studying these issues, and ways in which its utility for advancing research on marriage and the family could be enhanced. The basis for the recommended improvements comes from the discussion of a panel of experts convened by NORC for the Administration for Children and Families. To put these recommendations into clearer perspective, this paper begins with a review of the promises and current limitations of NLSY97 for studying marriage and family issues and ends with a discussion of first steps one could take in pursuing such enhancements.
The Utility of NLSY97 for Marriage/Family Research
NLSY97 is one of the most promising data sets to embody the critical characteristics needed for marriage/family research. It details the family circumstances of adolescents who were ages 12 to 16 in 1997. As a longitudinal data set, it has followed the transitions of these adolescents into early adulthood, and will continue to track their activities, relationships and well-being each year as they mature.1 The data are nationally representative with an original sample of nearly 9,000 observations, and include minority over-samples. There is extensive detail on family circumstances, not only for families headed by the youths’ parents but also, later, for families headed by the youths themselves. This detail includes: measures of relationship status (e.g., married, cohabiting, dating); parental status (e.g., residential, biological, marital, adoptive); data on nonresident parents, visitation and child support; relationship quality and family processes; measures of wellbeing; and detailed covariates in domains including education, work, income and program participation, risky behaviors, health, attitudes/expectations, and social context. Key transitions in many outcomes are also captured in extensive event history modules.
Opportunities to Learn More
These data offer a rich portrait of families over time and across two generations, yet their potential to inform marriage and family research is largely untapped due to their complexity and other limitations. With this in mind, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) asked NORC to convene a panel of experts to explore ways to strengthen the utility of the current NLSY97 for marriage and family researchers. Experts were asked to discuss these limitations and identify opportunities for enhancing its use in the future in relation to what they felt were important unanswered questions in the following areas:
- Pathways to cohabitation and marriage
- Relationship between family formation/marital status and employment
- Marriage outcomes
- Child well-being in different family structures
Within these topical areas, panel members felt the data offered significant potential to tackle what they felt were the critical unanswered questions in the field. The panel members’ suggestions for improving the data’s utility include several that would enable researchers and policy makers to more easily tap the NLSY97 as a ready source of information on how today’s families are doing. A second group of suggested enhancements would form a platform for greater collaboration on marriage and family research across policy areas and organizations, and establish a common body of knowledge that could help to leverage advancements in the field. Finally, the panel suggested enhancements they felt were vital to expanding our understanding of family functioning beyond what is already known, and preparing for the key family research questions on the horizon. These suggestions include the following:
Transforming the NLSY97 into a Ready Reference on Marriage and Family:
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Develop a user-friendly research roadmap--i.e., targeted NLSY97 documentation on marriage and family topics, with detailed information on key measures and variables, caveats and limitations, and control totals for populations of interest.
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Provide an on-line table generator that intersects marriage and family variables with other domains, such as work, education, health and program participation.
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Assess the adequacy of sample sizes and response rates for specific populations of interest (subpopulations suggested by the panel include low-income respondents, racial/ethnic groups, those who have been incarcerated or young black men.) Construct a “flat file” that would contain a limited subset of variables on the most relevant topics related to marriage and family in a user-friendly format.
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Provide more created variables that easily identify complex relationships, such as whether the respondent’s cohabiting partner is also the biological parent of her child.
- Identify, for key variables, the universe of eligible respondents, so the implications of missing data can be more easily assessed.
Creating a Common Knowledge Base and Platform for Collaboration/Leveraging:
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Establish an on-line collaboratory or message board on NLSY research topics related to marriage and family. This could be used to discuss difficult constructs, such as how to best define cohabitation, or to better encourage marriage and family research that reaches across multiple policy domains.
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Provide a repository for computer programs, tabulations or definitions of key outcomes related to marriage and the family within the NLSY97.
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Fund and publish analyses on key marriage-related questions and their policy implications using the NLSY97. This could include awarding dissertation or other small grants.
Deepening Our Understanding of Families and Planning for the Next Generation:
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Add survey questions on topics such as relationship skills, domestic violence, power and resource sharing, work/family balance, financial literacy, reasons why unmarried, measures of trust, and participation in or awareness of healthy marriage services.
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Capture spheres of influence outside the household, particularly as they affect children. This could include asking some questions of the focal respondent’s partner or the nonresident parents of their children, as well as extended family members.
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Add new respondents, such as immigrants, to make sample more reflective of today’s young adults.
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Add new questions that provide a more complete rostering of multiple partner fertility and complex step or social parent interactions.
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Add new questions that measure respondents’ interaction with their children, and their children’s wellbeing.
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Plan for the development of new cohorts. One proposed cohort representing a new cross section of youth in 2010 is already the topic of serious discussions between BLS and other government agencies, including the Department of Defense.
Overview conclusion
The panel of experts convened during the ACF-sponsored workshop was impressed by the depth of content in the NLSY97 as a significant resource for research on marriage and family. Proceedings from the workshop made it clear that the NLSY97 data could greatly inform critical unanswered research and policy questions in the area of marriage strengthening and child and family well-being. For example, the data could suggest answers to questions directly related to the ongoing implementation efforts of healthy marriage interventions such as:
- What are major barriers to forming and maintaining healthy marriage in society?
- What relationship skills and qualities appear most critical for healthy marriage?
- What are the differences among couples (e.g., by income or race/ethnicity in types and qualities of relationships and family structures?
- Which couples are at greatest risk and might benefit most from healthy marriage interventions?
- What sources of challenge and resilience among couples appear most relevant for health marriage and child well-being?
The data could answer similarly critical questions that intersect marriage with other important spheres of family functioning and highlight potential implications for policy more broadly. For example:
- What can be learned about how some families thrive when facing adverse conditions? What contributes to movement of disadvantaged families up the economic income scale? What role do public programs and social structures play?
- How can we better understand today’s complex family structures and identify ways to help ensure that all parents (biological and step, resident and non-resident) are appropriately engaged in the child’s wellbeing?
- How can we better understand the relationships between decisions regarding family formation and child bearing and other critical decisions such as those regarding employment opportunities or living arrangements/housing and the implications for each domain?
- What points over a child’s life appear to offer the greatest opportunities for families and society to make a difference in their well-being, and at what points are they most vulnerable?
The next section reviews the characteristics, strengths, and current limitations of the NLSY97 data. This is followed by a summary of the potential enhancements recommended by the expert panel, and a discussion of possible next steps in pursuing those enhancements.
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