The form and function of unmarried families

• Main Author: Knab, Jean Marie Tansey
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2004
• Subjects: Families & family life; Individual & family studies; Personal relationships; Public policy; Sociology; Welfare
• ISBN: 0496707477; 9780496707478

In three separate papers, this dissertation challenges previous conceptions of family structure to determine how altering the measurement and operationalization of family structure impacts research on unmarried families. All three papers use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a recent study of births to married and unmarried parents in large U.S. cities. My findings imply that family structure is more complex than many researchers allow for and that simplified constructions of the family may be missing important details. For instance, up to 30 percent of romantically-involved unmarried mothers are cohabiting part-time—a phenomenon that is not measured in large-scale surveys or recognized in quantitative research. Moreover, where you put these part-time cohabitors matters. While they are aggregated with full-time cohabitors in many data sets, their outcomes are more like dating couples. Including them as cohabitors may depress outcomes for cohabitors, exacerbating the differences between married and cohabiting couples. I also find high rates of multi-generational living arrangements (even among cohabiting couples). These multi-generational living arrangements are typically short-lived and, consequently, children experience high rates of changes in living arrangements. While multi-generational living arrangements are important indicators of the available social and economic resources available to children, researchers rarely incorporate them when looking at family structure's impacts on children, except among young mothers. Researchers also exclude these changes from measures of family change, greatly simplifying the experiences of children born to unmarried mothers. The complexities of these living arrangements also have implications for data collection. In complex households, respondents may have trouble reporting on group characteristics such as household income and it may be difficult to attain information on the multitude of adults who influence children's health and social behaviors. Finally, given that marriage is a current policy priority, I look at whether marriage is economically beneficial for unmarried mothers. Given their high rates of cohabitation and multi-generational living arrangements, it is not clear that marriage should be a panacea. This dissertation does find economic benefits to marriage in terms of reduced poverty and greater household income, but less evidence that marriage reduces material hardships.