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2
Demographic Perspectives
on Family Change
T
he task of integrating family research needs to start with defining
the family itself. Families consist of members with very different
perspectives, needs, obligations, and resources. The characteristics
of individual family members change over time—within life spans and
across generations. Families exist in a broader economic, social, and cul-
tural context that itself changes over time.
United States households and families are undergoing unprecedented
changes that are shaping the health and well-being of the nation. Funda-
mental and rapid changes in family structure, immigration, and work and
family, for example, have transformed the daily lives and developmental
trajectories of Americans in recent years. This chapter summarizes four
presentations, including three studies that examine family change largely
from a demographic perspective and one that drew on qualitative meth-
ods to identify specific groups in a larger quantitative study. Demographic
indicators provide a baseline of information for many other kinds of fam-
ily research.
A particular focus in this chapter is the set of measures used to iden-
tify and track consistency and change in family structure. New and rap-
idly changing family forms require the development of new measures
and their incorporation into existing and new instruments. New measures
also need to recognize the tremendous diversity among groups that can
be hidden in nationally representative averages of such family character-
istics as cohabitation, marriage, family disruption, and fertility levels. As
economic and cultural shifts, such as immigration, continue to diversify
7
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8 TOWARD AN INTEGRATED SCIENCE OF RESEARCH ON FAMILIES
family structure and dynamics, researchers need to explore new ways of
conceptualizing and measuring household characteristics.
MEASURING FAMILY STRUCTURE AND STABILITY:
EMERGING TRENDS AND MEASUREMENT CHALLENGES
Family living arrangements and trajectories are increasingly varied
and complex in the United States. Age of marriage is at an all-time high.
Cohabitation, not marriage, is the typical first type of union in U.S. society.
Divorce and remarriage remain common, and births to unmarried women
have accelerated rapidly, from 5 percent in 1960 to about 40 percent today.
These changing family dynamics have major implications for the liv-
ing arrangements of children, said Susan Brown, professor of sociology at
Bowling Green State University and codirector of the National Center for
Family and Marriage Research. Furthermore, these living arrangements
can have major consequences for children’s health and well-being, since
children in unmarried families experience greater family instability, on
average. Drawing on a recent review (Brown, 2010a) of the literature on
family structure, instability, and child well-being, Brown discussed cur-
rent measurement approaches and challenges.
The diversity of children’s family experiences begins at birth. Of the
40 percent of births occurring outside marriage, half are to unmarried
cohabiting couples (Martin et al., 2009). The fertility rates of cohabiting
and married women are actually today about equal. As a result, children
are spending less time in married-parent families and more time in fami-
lies that are formed outside marriage.
Table 2-1 shows the distribution of children’s living arrangements
according to a recent census report. The majority of children—60 percent—
still reside in traditional families with two biological married parents. The
second most common family form for children is the single-mother family,
in which about 20 percent of all children reside, followed by the married
stepfamily category. Less common family forms for children include two
biological cohabiting-parent families, cohabiting stepfamilies similar to
the married stepfamily, single-father families, and children who live with-
out either biological parent.
Demographers have developed innovative ways of conceptualizing
and measuring family structure. These new approaches consider hetero-
geneity among two-parent families, the definition of family membership,
some emerging family forms, how and when family structure is mea-
sured, and ambiguous family boundaries.
These new ways of thinking about two-parent families also make it
possible to begin examining how children who live in traditional mar-
ried biological two-parent families compare with those in other family
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9
DEMOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILY CHANGE
TABLE 2-1 Children’s Living Arrangements
Family Structure, Children Ages 0-17 in 2004 Percentage
Two-parent biological married family 60.1
Two-parent biological cohabiting family 2.5
Married stepfamily 7.4
Cohabiting stepfamily 2.7
Single-mother family 20.5
Single-father family 2.6
No-parent family 4.2
Total 100.0
SOURCE: Brown (2010b). Based on data from Kreider (2007).
arrangements. What about children who live with both biological parents
but the parents are unmarried? What about children who live in a steppar-
ent family or with one biological parent and an unmarried parent? What
about children who live with same-sex parents?
Traditional measures of family structure often ignore the presence
of other family members, even though these individuals can be conse-
quential for child well-being. For example, siblings can be whole siblings,
half-siblings, or step-siblings. For 6 to 11 percent of children who reside
with two biological married parents, half- or step-siblings are also in the
family (Ginther and Pollak, 2004; Halpern-Meekin and Tach, 2008). Step-
and half-siblings can also reside in other households, reflecting multiple
partner fertility. “Some researchers argue that it is not enough to measure
co-residential unions such as marriage and cohabitation, but that we also
need to be addressing non-co-residential dating types of relationships that
parents may be involved in,” said Brown. Not surprising, these “visiting
relationships” are frequently less stable than cohabiting and married ones.
The language has not kept pace with new family forms, Brown
observed. For example, with cohabiting relationships, researchers do not
have shared understandings of how to describe these families or refer to
family members. Some surveys use the term “unmarried partner,” but
qualitative research has demonstrated that this term is not particularly
meaningful for individuals who are involved in these relationships. They
tend to think of their unmarried partner as a “boyfriend” or a “girlfriend.”
And to the extent that response categories are not meaningful to survey
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10 TOWARD AN INTEGRATED SCIENCE OF RESEARCH ON FAMILIES
respondents, the prevalence and significance of cohabiting relationships
may be underestimated.
This is even more the case for living apart together (LAT) relation-
ships, which have attracted considerable attention in the European con-
text but have been largely overlooked in the United States. LAT rela-
tionships consist of married or unmarried couples who live in separate
households but otherwise are like cohabiting couples. The definition and
the measurement of LAT relationships are muddy, particularly in distin-
guishing them from dating relationships.
The timing of when people are asked about family structure also can
influence their responses. For example, in a survey conducted as part of the
Fragile Families study—which is following a cohort of about 5,000 children
in large cities born between 1998 and 2000, three-quarters of whom were
born to unmarried parents—mothers were asked when a child was born
whether they were married, cohabiting, or single. A year later they were
asked again whether they were married, cohabiting, or single when the
child was born. Among women married at the time of birth, 97 percent
said a year later that they were married at the time of birth. But for women
who said they were cohabiting, just 89 percent gave the same response a
year later. And for women who said they were single, just 67 percent said
they had been single a year later, with the others saying they were either
cohabiting or married (Teitler et al., 2006). These retrospective discrepan-
cies are consequential “for the subsequent relationship trajectories that the
mothers and hence their children experience,” Brown said.
Research has demonstrated that family structure is more subjective
than researchers might assume. In the National Longitudinal Study of
Adolescent Health—known as Add Health, a nationally representative
study of how social contexts affect the health and risk behaviors of teens
and young adults—adolescents and their mothers were asked about fam-
ily structure (Harris, 2009). In families with two biological parents, 99 per-
cent of the responses were the same. But in families with single mothers,
married stepparents, or cohabiting stepparents, 11.6 percent, 30.2 percent,
and 65.9 percent of the responses, respectively, were different (Brown
and Manning, 2009). “The more complex the family form, the greater the
family boundary ambiguity,” Brown said. This ambiguity can affect even
estimates of family structure, depending on which person in a family is
asked about the structure.
Future data collection efforts need to accommodate these complexities
by emphasizing longitudinal designs, by incorporating multiple fam-
ily members across households whenever possible, and by using more
nuanced measures of family configurations. These more nuanced con-
figurations will need to be validated through qualitative research to deter-
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11
DEMOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILY CHANGE
mine whether the categories are meaningful for individuals. In addition,
the increasingly diverse living arrangements of children demonstrate the
importance of moving beyond these static comparisons to look at family
dynamics and instability.
Family structure determinations provide a snapshot of children’s liv-
ing arrangements. But as children experience more diverse living arrange-
ments, they are also experiencing less stable ones. Some family forms
are more stable than others, so that family structure is confounded with
family instability.
Using Add Health data, Brown (2006) determined that, during a one-
year period, 7 percent of adolescents reported a family structure change.
For teens who were not residing in two biological parent families, this
figure was nearly twice as high—15 percent. “The structure you start out
with is setting you on a trajectory for subsequent stability or instability,”
she observed.
Birth contexts also set the stage for family trajectories. One study
(Raley and Wildsmith, 2004) found that a majority of children born to
married parents experience no family living arrangement transitions by
age 12, whereas most children who are born to either single or cohabit-
ing mothers experience at least one transition by that age. If cohabitation
transitions are included in the measure of family instability, the levels of
family transitions increase 30 percent for white families and 100 percent
for black families.
Marital transitions, whether divorce or remarriage, on average have
cumulative negative effects on child well-being (Cavanagh and Huston,
2008; Fomby and Cherlin, 2007). However, cohabitation transitions oper-
ate differently. Transitions from a cohabiting family into a single-mother
family have been linked to gains in well-being, or at least no change
(Brown, 2006). Stable cohabiting families appear to be detrimental to child
well-being on some dimensions relative to stable single-mother families
and stable married stepfamilies. Thus, different types of transitions can
have different effects on child outcomes.
A range of measures can capture family instability, including the
number of transitions, the types of transitions, the timing of transitions,
and the exposure to different family forms. For example, research1 has
examined whether transitions that occur early in children’s lives are the
most detrimental (Cavanagh and Huston, 2008; Heard, 2007). Other stud-
ies have examined the duration or proportion of time spent in a given
1The Board on Children, Youth, and Families convened a workshop on student mobility
in 2008. The workshop report, Student Mobility: Exploring the Impact of Frequent Moves on
Mobility: Summary of a Workshop, is available from the National Academies Press, http://
www.nap.edu.
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12 TOWARD AN INTEGRATED SCIENCE OF RESEARCH ON FAMILIES
family form (Dunifon and Kowaleski-Jones, 2002; Magnuson and Berger,
2009). “There is no consensus in the literature on how to operationalize
family instability,” said Brown. Sometimes researchers will use more than
one indicator. Sometimes they will control for current family structure or
structure at birth. “This is a situation in which our data have outpaced
our theory.”
Family scholars need to revisit and expand existing theories related
to family instability, Brown said. They also need to develop new theoreti-
cal frameworks for understanding how, why, and when family instability
shapes children’s outcomes. Some of this theory development could be
informed by a systematic review of these empirical findings, which are
extensive and complex.
Researchers need to strive for greater consistency across studies in the
measurement of family instability. Also, they need to pay more attention
to various groups for whom family instability might have differential
effects. These groups include disadvantaged populations, such as chil-
dren who are born to unmarried mothers, and different racial and ethnic
groups. In particular, few studies have been conducted on Latino families.
Gay and lesbian families have also been understudied.
The broad array of diverse living arrangements has generated consid-
erable interest in family instability, but there is no consensus on how to
conceptualize or measure it. “Innovative measurement will require new
concepts and theories that reflect these very rapid changes that are occur-
ring in U.S. families,” Brown observed.
THE COMPLEXITY OF LIVING ARRANGEMENTS:
COHABITATION AND FLUIDITY
R. Kelly Raley, professor of sociology and training director at the Pop-
ulation Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, explored the
issues of cohabitation more deeply. In most research, cohabitation means
sharing a household with a sexual or romantic partner. Roommates who
are not sexually involved therefore are not usually considered cohabiting
couples, nor are sexual partners who are not living together. Cohabita-
tion is generally applied to both heterosexual and homosexual unions,
although by far the majority of the research in this area has focused on
heterosexual partnerships. Levels of commitment in cohabiting relation-
ships range from extended hookups or casual sexual relationships to
couples who are engaged to be married within a few days. Some have a
residence elsewhere but sleep over most of the time, perhaps to hide from
parents that they are cohabiting.
Demographers often use a three-category grouping for cohabitation.
The first group consists of cohabiters who may be experimenting with a
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DEMOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILY CHANGE
married living arrangement. They may be engaged to marry or plan to
marry eventually. A second group, known as the “alternative to being sin-
gle” group, may not intend to stay together for the long term but enjoy the
convenience and the economies of scale of living with a romantic partner.
A third group, the “alternative to marriage” group includes people who
view traditional marriage critically and choose not to marry, although in
most other ways the relationship resembles marriage.
Within the group that is treating cohabitation as a trial marriage, there
is substantial heterogeneity. Some have a marriage date, and others would
like to marry someday but face many barriers, such as unstable employ-
ment or drug and alcohol abuse. For this latter group, these barriers will
probably contribute to the end of their cohabiting union before they get
married.
One way to view cohabitation is as a signal or a symptom of growing
female autonomy. From this perspective, much family change has been
generated by long-term shifts in ideology that undermine old patriar-
chal family arrangements. For example, increases in women’s labor force
opportunities have made them less dependent on marriage. Since people
still enjoy companionship, cohabitation serves as an alternative, less com-
mitted, and less patriarchal arrangement.
An alternative way to view cohabitation is as a response to uncer-
tainty, particularly economic uncertainty. Difficult transitions into a career,
with spells of unemployment or underemployment following the comple-
tion of education, strongly predict cohabitation.
Today about half of all marriages dissolve. However, divorce rates are
declining among the college educated, although they remain high and are
maybe even growing among the less well educated. People with less edu-
cation rightly believe that marriage is uncertain, particularly when steady
employment is in short supply. Cohabitation is a response to this uncer-
tainty both about marriage and about their future economic prospects.
Demographers started to track cohabitation closely as family struc-
tures changed substantially over the 1970s and 1980s. Important trends
include the rising age at marriage, increases in divorce, and rapid growth
in single-parent families. As shown in Figure 2-1, the proportion of women
married by age 25 has declined substantially by birth cohort. The propor-
tion of women having a first union by age 25 also declined during that
period, though not nearly as much as the rate of marriage. The increas-
ing gap between percentages of first union and marriage before age 25
points to a rise of cohabitation. Raley also pointed out that cohabitation
is increasingly common after a divorce, but much less is known about the
repartnering process and postmarital cohabitation.
Cohabitation has become an increasingly common feature of child-
hood. Most of the increase in nonmarital fertility in recent decades has
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14 TOWARD AN INTEGRATED SCIENCE OF RESEARCH ON FAMILIES
FIGURE 2-1 Trends in the percentage of women ever in union by age 25.
SOURCE: Raley (2010), based on data from, (a) Bumpass et al. (1991); (b) Raley
(2001); and (c) CDC/NCHS, National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) Cycle 6
(2006-2008).
come from births to cohabiting women (see Figure 2-2). Consequently,
an increasing proportion of children—perhaps as many as half—live at
some point in their life with a cohabiting mother. Tracking cohabitation
can improve measurements of family stability. Fewer cohabiting unions
now result in marriage than in the past. After about five years, only about
half such couples are married, and 37 percent have split (Bumpass and Lu,
2000). By this measure, even though levels of divorce have been roughly
stable since 1980, the probability that a child experiences a union dissolu-
tion is increasing.
Rates of cohabitation vary across population groups. For example,
many previous studies have shown that cohabitation is more common
among less educated groups. However, if cohabitation is measured in the
first three years after leaving school, it is seen to be a common feature of
the life course for all education groups (Daniels and Raley, 2010). It is the
most common family formation event in the first three years after leaving
school. What is different across groups with different levels of education
is that the more highly educated women are more likely to marry. More
educated women are also less likely to have a premarital birth (Daniels
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15
DEMOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILY CHANGE
40
30
20
10
0
1980-84 1985-94 1995-2001
(a) (b)
(b)
Single Cohabitating
FIGURE 2-2 Trends in the percentage of births that are nonmarital.
SOURCE: Raley (2010), based on data from (a) Bumpass and Lu (2000); and (b)
Kennedy and Bumpass (2008). Figure 2-2
and Raley, 2010). Thus, there is substantial variation by socioeconomic
status in family formation patterns.
These observations relate to the underlying meaning of cohabita-
tion. Whether cohabitation signals changes due to growing autonomy or
growing uncertainty depends in part on class. For more highly educated
women, it may well indicate growing autonomy and increasing choices.
For less educated women, it appears that cohabitation is likely more a
response to uncertainty. Qualitative research suggests that many women
who want eventually to have a child and who realistically are unlikely to
marry soon may stop using contraceptives in a cohabiting relationship.
Raley stated, “They often become pregnant, maybe sooner than expected,
but it isn’t a concern. It is just something that happens sooner. It is not
exactly planned, but it is not exactly something that they were trying to
avoid.”
Cohabitation is not institutionalized. No broadly shared understand-
ings of privileges or obligations are associated with this status. This limits
the usefulness of cohabitation as an indicator of family structure in two
ways, said Raley. By covering a diverse range of relationship types, this
ambiguity creates a problem for the development of survey questions
to measure cohabitation. For example, if people are asked about their
relationship to the householder and “unmarried partner” is one of the
response choices, they often do not check that response even if they
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16 TOWARD AN INTEGRATED SCIENCE OF RESEARCH ON FAMILIES
meet the definition of that term. Starting in 1990, the census measured
cohabitation by including unmarried partner as a type of relationship
to householder (Kreider, 2007). Then, in 2007, the census began asking,
“Is there somebody in the household who is your boyfriend, girlfriend,
or partner?” This new question resulted in an increase of 17 percentage
points in the number of people in cohabiting relationships (Kreider, 2008).
Another way in which cohabitation is limited as an indication of fam-
ily structure is related to its diversity. Some cohabiters are engaged to be
married, and others have no intention to marry. For studies that aim to
understand the limitations of cohabitation for children’s or adults’ well-
being, this variability is potentially as great as the difference between
being married and being single. For this reason, it is important to measure
not only household structure but also the quality and the commitment of
relationships.
Cohabitation or marriage is not the only important aspect of house-
hold structure. A small literature indicates that child well-being may be
influenced by the presence of half- or step-siblings, even when they are
living with both biological parents. One approach to measuring these
relationships involves the use of a matrix in which each person in a house-
hold is asked about the relationship of each person in the household to
each other person in the household. “It can be kind of burdensome, but it
will be thorough in capturing all the children’s relationships to all other
children in the household,” Raley said.
The Current Population Survey has taken a less burdensome alterna-
tive. It is asking about all the parent figures for a child in a household,
whether a biological parent, a stepparent, or an adoptive parent. “Hope-
fully this new resource will help us better measure the additional impor-
tant aspects of children’s household structure,” Raley said.
The final limitation of cohabitation measures is that they do not cap-
ture nonhousehold family relationships. For example, parents transition-
ing into and out of visiting relationships may introduce important aspects
of change and instability into children’s lives. Similarly, research shows
that half-siblings, former spouses, and extended kin living elsewhere can
influence family functioning.
If the diversity in cohabiting households is great, the variability in
noncohabiting single-parent households is even broader and more ambig-
uous. Some mothers are raising children on their own with little help or
interference from the child’s father, extended kin, or current boyfriends.
Others are maintaining a complex network of relationships with fathers
of their children. These external household members can bear on family
processes in the household.
Despite the limitations of cohabitation as a measure of family struc-
ture, it should not be abandoned, Raley said. Cohabitation is a common
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DEMOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILY CHANGE
experience and a useful indicator of instability. However, as family struc-
ture continues to change and diversify, innovative ways of capturing
change and variability must be developed. In particular, it is important
to measure levels of commitment and the quality of relationships and to
distinguish variability among cohabiting unions.
INTERGENERATIONAL ASPECTS OF
CHANGE IN FAMILY PATTERNS
Research on family structures usually begins with static measures,
which have been used in recent years to capture an increasing diversity
of family forms. But dynamic measures of family structure change also
have shown tremendous improvement, as have measures of family and
social networks. These developments have made it possible to study fam-
ily structure across generations, said Kathleen Mullan Harris, professor of
sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of
the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Harris, 2009; Harris
et al., 2009).
Since 1994, Add Health has collected data on four waves of study
participants to explore the causes of health and health-related behaviors of
adolescents and their outcomes in young adulthood (Harris, 2009). The par-
ticipants in wave I were in grades 7-12 when the study began. Among these
adolescents, 74 percent lived in two-parent families and 26 percent lived in
single-parent families. The majority of adolescents lived with two biologi-
cal or adoptive parents (54 percent). Approximately 20 percent lived with
a single mother, 14 percent lived with a biological mother and stepfather, 6
percent lived with surrogate parents (including grandparents, uncles, older
siblings, foster parents, in group homes, and so on), 3 percent lived with a
single father, and 3 percent lived with a biological father and stepmother. As
these numbers demonstrate, there is tremendous heterogeneity of families
and some fuzziness between categories, said Harris.
The Add Health study also gathered data on parents’ relationship histo-
ries and on a child’s coresidence history, which can be mapped with his or
her age. Thus, measures of family structure are available each year, making
it possible to construct indicators or trajectories of family structure over
time. Family structure transitions also can be measured dynamically and
added up over a child’s life.
These changes in family structure can be quite complex, Harris observed.
Children can experience many parents in their lives. Gathering this informa-
tion also can be costly in terms of survey time and taxing for respondents.
Despite these difficulties, the available data show that family change at the
level of parents affects family formation in a child’s generation. The data
from Add Health have supported other studies in concluding that growing
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18 TOWARD AN INTEGRATED SCIENCE OF RESEARCH ON FAMILIES
up in a nonintact family form is associated with teenage parenthood, early
marriage, nonmarital childbearing, and life-course trajectories of family
instability. These intergenerational effects were consistent across numerous
studies in the 1980s and 1990s.
The intergenerational effects of family change can operate in multiple
contexts in a child’s life. Children spend time with their friends, their class-
mates, the families of their friends and classmates, and families in their
neighborhoods. The family patterns encountered during a child’s life may
be especially influential during adolescence, when young people begin to
look to the future and form expectations about the kinds of families that
they will form. They undergo a collective socialization toward family forms
by observing them in the social contexts of their lives. Members of a parent’s
generation serve as role models, especially when romantic relationships
become salient during adolescence. The social control of youth through
monitoring and supervision is also important, and this is related to the
number of adults in the social context of an adolescent’s life.
This collective socialization can be difficult to study because of a lack
of data. But the design of Add Health provides an opportunity to study
intergenerational effects by looking at collective socialization at the peer, the
school, and the neighborhood levels (Harris et al., 2009). For example, data
from both wave I and wave II capture youth in the transition to adulthood
to age 26 (Harris, 2009). Peer data are obtained by getting information from
the adolescent’s five best male and five best female friends. Family data
come from both parent and adolescent interviews, and neighborhood data
come from geocoded residence addresses. The family structure of friends,
families in schools, and families in the neighborhood can be measured
through the percentage of two-parent families, single-parent families, and
other family forms.
Add Health data reveal the cumulative probabilities of first nonmarital
births by the structure of the family of origin (Figure 2-3). The lowest prob-
abilities of first nonmarital birth are to youth who grew up in a biological
two-parent family. The highest probability is for youth who grew up in a
surrogate family or other family type.
The same analysis can be done by looking at the percentage of a per-
son’s friends from two-parent families. The lowest probabilities of nonmari-
tal births are among individuals all of whose friends are in two-parent fami-
lies (Figure 2-4). When measured by the percentage of students at a school
from single-parent families, the highest risks are for individuals with high
percentages of schoolmates from single-parent families. And when mea-
sured by the percentage of female-headed households with children, the
risk is also higher in neighborhoods with large numbers of single mothers.
Modeling of these results has shown that the influences on nonmarital
births act independently and are additive, said Harris. Youths who grow
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19
DEMOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILY CHANGE
0.5
Two Biological Parents
Mom w/ Step Dad
Cumulative Probability
0.4 Dad w/ Step Mom
Single Mom
Single Dad
0.3 Other Family Type
0.2
0.1
0.0
13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
Age
FIGURE 2-3 The cumulative probabilities of first nonmarital birth vary by the struc-
ture of the family of origin.
SOURCE: Harris (2010), based on data from Harris and Cheng (2005).
0.5
Less than 50%
50%–74%
Cumulative Probability
0.4
75%–88%
100%
0.3
0.2
0.1
0.0
13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
Age
FIGURE 2-4 Cumulative probabilities of first nonmarital birth vary by the percent-
age of friends from two-parent families.
SOURCE: Harris (2010), based on data from Harris and Cheng (2005).
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20 TOWARD AN INTEGRATED SCIENCE OF RESEARCH ON FAMILIES
up with two biological parents but live in a neighborhood in which single-
parent households are prevalent face higher probabilities of nontraditional
family formation.
Some researchers have begun to think about creating family histories of
instability or stability across generations, Harris observed. The Add Health
study plans to reinterview parents in the next wave of data collection. It also
plans to interview the children of the adult respondents, generating data
that spans three generations. Additional questions are whether there are
patterns that occur across more than one generation and whether effects on
family structure extend beyond a child’s family. But family change patterns
across multiple generations are difficult to study.
Some innovative designs and current research are under way. For
example, genetic data could help sort out shared and unshared genetic
and environmental sources of variation in family formation patterns
across generations.
MEASURING THE IMPACT OF RACE, CLASS, AND
IMMIGRATION STATUS ON FAMILY STABILITY
Study of family structure began with mostly white scholars concerned
about issues that affected mostly white, middle class, native-born Ameri-
cans. But American society is much different today, observed demographer
Daniel Lichter, professor of policy analysis and management and sociol-
ogy and director of the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center at Cornell Uni-
versity. Immigration has driven racial, ethnic, and class variation in the
United States by creating rapid growth in the non-European immigrant
population. Among Asians and Pacific Islanders, for example, almost
90 percent of children have a foreign-born parent. Among Hispanics,
it is about two-thirds. These two groups are changing the ethnic and
racial composition of U.S. society. The fact that America’s new immigrant
groups are mostly young adults means that their growing children will
have a substantial effect on family change for the foreseeable future. As
recent trends demonstrate, family science must include the immigrant
experience and how immigrant children are being raised in society.
As shown in Figure 2-5, there has been a tremendous increase in the
volume of immigration in the United States over the last 10 years. Until
the recent recession, about a million new legal immigrants were arriving
in the United States every year (Martin and Midgley, 2006). Much of this
immigration is from Asia and Latin America. In addition, another 12 to 13
million immigrants are undocumented, and the future of this group will
have major implications for the country’s future.
Roughly half of the growth in the U.S. population since 2000 has come
from Hispanics, both through immigration and through the fertility of the
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DEMOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILY CHANGE
FIGURE 2-5 Legal immigration to the United States was high around the turn of
the century, declined during the Great Depression, and has risen steadily since the
end of World War II.
SOURCE: Martin and Midgley (2006). Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2006
by Population Reference Bureau. Based on data from Yearbook of Immigration
Statistics: 2005.
new immigrant populations. This has created a large built-in demographic
momentum for the future population growth of this group (Martin and
Midgley, 2006).
The U.S. Census Bureau (2010a) is projecting that by 2042 the United
States will be a “majority minority” society—where the minority popula-
tion exceeds the non-Hispanic white population. But for America’s chil-
dren, the future is now. About half of all births in the United States are
now to groups other than non-Hispanic whites. Already, the absolute
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22 TOWARD AN INTEGRATED SCIENCE OF RESEARCH ON FAMILIES
numbers of white and black Americans are declining. “Over the next
20 years, the racial and ethnic composition of scholars studying family
changes is going to be much different than we see in this room today,”
Lichter said.
Immigrants are more widely dispersed in the United States than they
have been in the past. Hispanic populations are growing rapidly in many
parts of the United States, often drawn to specific occupations. This growth
is occurring in many locations that are different from traditional Hispanic
gateway locations. Lichter observed, “I grew up in South Dakota. For a
while when I was in college, I lived in a working class neighborhood in
Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It was a Catholic church that I attended. I went
back there recently to this working class neighborhood. Now that neigh-
borhood is mostly Hispanic. The church is Our Lady of Guadalupe. They
have Spanish-speaking masses. It is four blocks away from the Morrill meat
packing plant.” These new immigration patterns will have implications for
schooling, neighborhood segregation, the use of English, and many other
issues, said Lichter.
From the perspective of family structure, an important observation is
that family structure and change are not the sole determinants of racial and
ethnic variation in poverty. Family structure will certainly have some effect
on the poverty rates of children when they become adults, but it is not the
sole factor.
Population-based, nationally representative studies have focused on
marriage patterns, cohabitation, family disruption, and fertility. But most of
this research is focused on a single point in time and does not capture the
dynamics of family instability, particularly for different immigrant groups
or for different immigrant experiences. National averages hide tremendous
diversity across different racial and ethnic groups.
For example, research by D. J. Hernandez (2004) has demonstrated dif-
ferences between native-born and immigrant children in U.S. households.
Immigrant children are more likely to live in households with nonparents
and to be in crowded households, and they are at greater risk of a variety
of negative experiences that may have certain developmental consequences
(see Figure 2-6) (Hernandez, 2004).
Many immigrant children live with extended families, a situation
known in some groups as “doubling up.” Some groups also have very dif-
ferent experiences with transnational families that are linked in fundamen-
tal ways to families in other countries. Partners, spouses, and children may
not be living with their parents but going back and forth between different
countries.
Another issue that deserves consideration is interracial and intraracial
marriage. When children have parents of mixed racial and ethnic groups,
or if they have one native parent and one foreign-born parent, these factors
have implications for issues of racial identity and assimilation.
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DEMOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILY CHANGE
FIGURE 2-6 Immigrant children have more risk factors than do native-born children.
NOTE: The four risk factors are (1) having a mother who has not graduated from
high school; (2) living in economic deprivation (based on the 2x-poverty measure);
(3) living in a linguistically isolated household; and (4) living in a one-parent family
SOURCE: Hernandez (2004). Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2004 by The
Future of Children, a publication of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
Structural and cultural variations in family structure, parenting prac-
tices, and child outcomes are other key issues, as are school and neighbor-
hood contexts, including neighborhood segregation of immigrants. In the
past, geographic and social mobility have tended to go hand in hand. But
with the new movement of Hispanic groups into new destinations, that is
changing. Many are less educated and have higher rather than lower rates
of fertility, which is driving population change in these communities. “We
don’t know very much about the white response in these areas, whether
there is going to be a new kind of spatial patterning of out-migration or
white flight from these rural areas. These are all issues that have implica-
tions for the future well-being of children generally but immigrant children
in particular,” said Lichter.
Several critical kinds of data are lacking. Large national longitudinal
survey samples often lack enough immigrants to drawn meaningful con-
clusions. Cross-sectional studies and the census tend to emphasize the
prevalence of demographic characteristics rather than behavioral changes.
Retrospective data do not enable much modeling because not enough data
are available on such factors as economic conditions, employment, or
migration. For these and other reasons, research on immigration is not par-
ticularly nuanced or cumulative. Lichter observed, “it is very hard to link
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24 TOWARD AN INTEGRATED SCIENCE OF RESEARCH ON FAMILIES
one discrete piece of research on a particular population of Vietnamese or
Asians or Koreans or other groups with a broader theoretical or conceptual
perspective. It is very hard to get a handle about what is important or what
is needed next.”
A critical need in surveys is to distinguish second-generation Ameri-
cans from higher generation Americans. It would be useful for more sur-
veys to include a question on the country of origin of each parent. Lichter
said, “I wish we had that in our census data, but we don’t. We have it in the
Current Population Survey, so you can do some things that make sense, but
not in the decennial census or American Community Survey.”
Other data needs include the relationship of each person to everyone
else in a household, income transfers and social support, mode of entry,
migration histories, and connections to the ancestral country or country of
origin.
Changes to the American Community Survey have made it possible
to examine issues in ways that could not be done in the past (U. S. Cen-
sus Bureau, 2010b). For example, a new question beginning in 2008 asks
whether a respondent had a birth in the past year. This can be linked to
marital status, yielding insights into fertility among cohabiting partners.
Another series of question asks whether, during the past 12 months, a
respondent was married, widowed, or divorced and how many times a
person has been married. With this information, researchers can investigate
marriage, remarriage, and other dynamic family processes.
Immigration is becoming an increasingly important issue in U.S. soci-
ety. Lichter also observed, “A growing racial and ethnic diversity is here to
stay, even with highly restrictive immigration policy, in part because of the
high rates of fertility that we have seen in the recent past.” Assimilation
does not amount to cultural genocide, Lichter observed. Groups equilibrate
over time and continually affect each other.
THE USE OF MIXED METHODS IN THE
STUDY OF THE HURRIED CHILD
Another striking characteristic of modern families is the extent to
which children are involved in multiple activities in addition to their time
in school and at home. Sandra Hofferth, professor of family science and
director of the Maryland Population Research Center at the University
of Maryland, gave an example of a mixed quantitative-qualitative study
conducted when she was a member of the Center for the Ethnography of
Everyday Life at the University of Michigan. The question she addressed
is whether busy children are overly stressed and pressured. One challenge
was to define and measure “busy-ness.”
She and her colleagues conducted qualitative interviews of parents
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DEMOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON FAMILY CHANGE
and children ages 9 to 12 in 43 Michigan families (Hofferth, 2009). There
was some variation in family structure, but these interviews were limited
to white families with a mother who had at least a high school education.
Parents and children were asked about the children’s activities, whether
there were too many, whether they wanted to change, and what allowed
them to manage their lives. This approach allowed the researchers to
determine what parents meant by saying that their child had too many
activities and too little time.
The results indicated that both the number and time spent in activi-
ties mattered. The researchers also needed to define and measure stress.
They found that parents mentioned the child crying or being sick, tired,
and not wanting to participate in an activity as signs of stress. To obtain
comparable measures of activities and the time spent in them in a large
quantitative study, the researchers used data from time-diary interviews
with a nationally representative sample of children ages 9 to 12 across the
United States. Based on the distinct groups that arose from the qualita-
tive study, they created four categories—hurried, balanced, focused, and
inactive—using the amount of time and number of activities in which
the child participated. They also used a standard scale of internalizing
behavior problems to measure stress, which included such attributes
as high-strung, nervous, fearful, anxious, unhappy, sad, and depressed.
They then associated the activity categories with measures of stress using
multivariate methods.
They found, counterintuitively, that the more inactive children had
higher levels of stress than the more active children. Parents have a ten-
dency to seek equilibria, said Hofferth. Parents had made changes in the
schedules of children who were overly stressed; therefore, children were
not currently stressed. The inactive children were a greater challenge to
parents, who wanted their children to become more involved with activi-
ties. This was a source of tension and stress in the parent-child relation-
ship. Parents reported that when less involved children became involved
in activities, children’s stress symptoms declined. “The results strike at
strongly held stereotypes and beliefs,” said Hofferth. “Many refuse to
believe the results in spite of the fact that parental interviews confirm
them.”
Quantitative research is a largely deductive process, she said. It allows
researchers to weed through hypotheses, throwing out some and keep-
ing others, at least temporarily. Qualitative research is inductive. It starts
with data, develops and improves constructs, questions, and measures,
and often results in unanticipated findings. This research can produce
important insights—but it also raises challenges. It generates enormous
amounts of data, and it can be difficult to distill the results into concise
conclusions. Coordinating this research may always be difficult. And
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26 TOWARD AN INTEGRATED SCIENCE OF RESEARCH ON FAMILIES
it can also be difficult to find journals willing to publish this kind of
research, since journals prefer short, focused articles on narrowly defined
topics. Hofferth’s work on the hurried child, for example, eventually was
published in an edited volume (Hofferth, 2009).
DISCUSSION
During the discussion period, Jane Guyer pointed out that families
were unstable in the earlier part of the century because of a high rate of
adult mortality, which was followed by a period of relative stability before
the modern period of increased instability. She then asked whether certain
forms of family instability today, such as incarceration, are the equivalent
of death, because an adult can suddenly disappear from a child’s life and
not return. Kathleen Mullan Harris pointed out that if a single-parent
household is formed as a result of parental death, child outcomes do
not differ that much from two-parent families in comparison to families
that undergo divorce, separation, or abandonment. She speculated that
a divorce or separation may be accompanied by conflict that has a nega-
tive effect on a child. Also, the children of a deceased parent can remain
in contact with the deceased parent’s family, grandparents, and extended
social network, so there is not as great a loss of social capital.
Susan Brown noted that one in four black children who were born
in 1990 had a parent in prison by the age of 14 (Wildeman, 2009). “For
particular subpopulations, imprisonment really is a significant factor that
only now is getting some attention.”
Hirokazu Yoshikawa asked whether surveys are being modified to
capture diversity in family structure. Brown responded that working
groups are dealing with the issues and that progress is under way. For
example, the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowl-
ing Green State University is compiling data on cohabitation. This will
be particularly helpful in refining the terminology used to discuss family
forms.
Jere Behrman asked about family structure in other parts of the world,
and Kelly Raley briefly discussed work in Western Europe. There is con-
siderable geographic and population variation in family structure even
in Western Europe, she noted. Similarly, in Latin America, both overall
and detailed patterns differ from other parts of the world. “We need to
move toward capturing some of this variability,” she said. “Just using the
umbrella term of ‘cohabitation’ is obscuring some important variations
across racial and ethnic groups.”
