Parenting, Partnering and Human Development
The body of research from this theme demonstrates the value of intergenerational and life course perspectives and documents the ways that family roles and relationships change as individuals move across life stages and thereby constitute evolving contexts for human development. Research within this theme speaks to three major issues: the formation and maintenance of relationships among adults; relations between adults and young people with families; and moving away from family "effects," to the developing lives of individual family members. PRC researchers are leaders in showing how family roles/relationships change across life stages, constituting evolving contexts for human development. They are pioneering work showing families as the sources and productions of social stratification. A core emphasis of the scholarship at the PRC is the formation of adult relationships within demographic, cultural, and social contexts. Researchers also explore micro- and macro-level factors that bolster relationship quality and stability. Relationships strongly shape health and reproduction, and PRC researchers are working on uncovering the pathways through which they contribute to health and reproductive disparities. The family research program at the PRC is very interdisciplinary, drawing especially from sociology, psychology, human development, and family science but also from economics, education and policy studies.
Area Projects
Family Exchanges Study II
Principal Investigator: Karen Fingerman
Additional Investigator: Timothy Loving
Funded by: National Institute on Aging
Due to cultural traditions, limited government assistance for young adults, and gaps in services for elderly adults in the US, family ties are a mainstay of support. Rewards and demands of providing and receiving support may have profound effects on each family member's well-being. The proposed study will collect a second wave of data from Family Exchanges Study (NIA R01AG027769) which interviewed 633 middle-aged adults, their grown children (n = 592), aging parents (n = 377) and spouses who were parents of the grown children (n = 197) about their relationships and exchanges of support in 2008. Over 36% of participants identified as racial minority. FES2 will provide an unprecedented opportunity to examine family exchanges over time, factors that influence exchanges, and implications of exchanges for individual physical and psychological health. Aim 1) Describe and explain changes and continuity in support. FES2 will examine variability and identify factors that elicit changes in support over time. Family support may alter due to events in individual family members' lives or in the larger social context. The multi-reporter design of FES will illuminate how changes in support to one family member affect support of other family members. Aim 2) Assess repercussions of receiving support over time. In FES1, many individuals received considerable support, but we know little about consequences of receiving support over time. We will assess effectiveness of support at FES1 in eliciting positive outcomes or deterring negative outcomes in FES2 for different family members. Aim 3) Examine implications of providing support family support. We address a fundamental contradiction in the literature: whether providing family support is beneficial or detrimental to well-being. FES1 captured helping situations appraised as either stressful or rewarding. FES2 will begin to establish links between providing help under different conditions and individual physical and psychological health. A data collection burst will provide unique information regarding daily interactions between grown children and their parents as well as salivary hormones associated with stress (i.e., DHEA and cortisol). Most young adults and their parents report frequent contact and FES2 will be the first to examine their daily interactions. The dyadic data will provide insights into how each party's daily life affects the other and how daily interactions fit into broader relationship patterns. The hormones may provide physiological evidence for theories regarding implications of relationship qualities and support exchanges under stressful versus rewarding circumstances. In sum, FES2 will allow an unprecedented longitudinal examination of support exchanges within and between families from perspectives of multiple family members in a diverse sample. The parent-child tie is highly influential throughout life and has a large impact on psychological and physical health and mortality. This study has potential practical implications for improving support patterns and relationships within families and thus, individual health and well-being.
Language Brokering and Child Adjustment in Mexican American Families
Principal Investigator: Su Yeong Kim
Funded by: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Children play a critical role in the resettlement process of immigrant families, particularly in the role of language broker, which has them translating between the heritage language and English for their immigrant parents, whose English is limited. Although close to 90% of children function in a language brokering role in immigrant families, the ways in which language brokering experiences affect developmental outcomes has received limited attention from immigration scholars. The proposed project will conduct qualitative interviews with forty Mexican American mother-daughter pairs. These families will be selected from a larger study of language brokers and divided into three theoretically meaning groups based on the children's high or low scores on school GPA and depressive symptoms: those showing positive adjustment, those showing negative adjustment, and those showing mixed adjustment. The proposed project uses case analyses to treat each mother-daughter pair as a single unit of analysis, and uses cross-case analysis to organize and merge common themes across cases. Using this methodology, the project will pursue three aims. First, we will examine how feelings about language brokering influence the quality of the mother-daughter relationship and adolescent adjustment. We expect that positive, negative, or mixed feelings about language brokering will parallel the positive, negative, or mixed quality of the parent-child relationship and adolescent adjustment. Second, we will explore how feelings about language brokering in public influence the themes derived in Aim 1. As language brokering in adult-centric public spaces is considered more stressful than translating for a parent at home, we will address separately the issue of how feelings about language brokering in public relate to the quality of the parent-child relationship and adolescent adjustment. Third, we will explore how convergence/divergence in feelings about language brokering in mother-daughter dyads influences the themes derived in Aim 1. We expect that convergence of positive feelings about language brokering will coincide with a positive parent-child relationship and a high level of adolescent adjustment. We also expect that convergence of negative feelings about language brokering will coincide with a negative quality to the parent-child relationship and poor adolescent adjustment. We will explore whether divergence between mothers and daughters in their feelings about language brokering relates to the quality of the parent-child relationship and adolescent adjustment. This project can inform future large-scale research efforts by illuminating how language brokering impacts parent-child relationships, and, more importantly, children's adjustment in terms of both academic and socio-emotional outcomes. This project has the potential to inform population science about the differential processes, practices, and experiences of language brokering and the potential impact on the adjustment of Mexican children, the largest and fastest growing minority group in the U.S.
Transitioning Into and Out of Nonmarital Romances: Health Consequences
Principal Investigator: Timothy Loving
Additional Investigators: Marci Gleason
Funded by: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Virtually all Western marriages are preceded by a series of relationship transitions, beginning with movement into new romances (i.e., falling in love) and followed by a series of changes in the depth of association (e.g., increasing commitment versus breaking up). Despite the ubiquitousness of nonmarital romantic relationship transitions, and the powerful role these bonds more generally play in individuals' lives, scientific knowledge regarding how such transitions shape the physical and mental health of those involved is sparse. The overall objective of this application, which represents an important first step in this endeavor, is to determine how transitioning into and out of nonmarital romances affects never-married emerging adults' acute stress reactivity, physical health, and mental health outcomes as a function of the qualitative nature of the transition. The central hypothesis of this application is that nonmarital relationship transitions differentially affect individuals' physical and mental health outcomes. This hypothesis will be tested by pursuing three specific aims: (1) To examine the effect of transitions into and out of nonmarital romances on individuals' acute stress reactivity, physical health, and mental health; (2) To assess the extent to which dependence on a relationship moderates the effects of relationship termination; (3) To assess the extent to which gender moderates the effects of each transition. Never-married emerging adults in the early developmental phase of their nonmarital romances will be exposed to a standardized acute stress task during either the beginning of their relationship, after it ends, or after the relationship has persevered for at least 9 months. Cortisol responses will be assessed during exposure to the acute stress task. Additionally, participants will provide self-assessments of their current physical and mental health at the start of the study and after their relationships has persevered or terminated. The proposed work is innovative because it highlights the physical and mental impact of transitions into and out of nonmarital romances in a single investigation. The work is significant because it expands the scientific study of close relationships and their health impacts and could serve as the foundation for intervention strategies designed to help individuals better understand the impact their romantic relationship experiences have on their health.
Doctoral Dissertation Research: Race and Ethnic Differences in Remarriage
Principal Investigator: Catherine McNamee
Faculty Sponsor: Kelly Raley
Funded by: National Science Foundation
Why do Mexican Americans have patterns of first marriage and divorce similar to whites, but lower rates of remarriage? One explanation is that people with higher socio-economic status have higher marriage rates and lower divorce rates than people with lower socio-economic status. However, Mexican Americans marry at rates comparable to non-Hispanic whites and divorce at slightly lower rates. Some have argued that Mexican American marriage is supported by their cultural orientation towards familialism. However, this is inconsistent with patterns of remarriage for Mexican Americans who remarry at rates significantly lower than non-Hispanic whites. This study investigates the unexplained race and ethnic variation in remarriage using: 1) the National Survey Family Growth, 2) the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and 3) 30 in-depth interviews of 15 Mexican American and 15 non-Hispanic White recently divorced women living in Austin, Texas.
Using O*NET to Investigate Sources of Educational and Racial Variation in Marriage
Principal Investigator: Kelly Raley
Funded by: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Educational and racial differences in a variety of health related outcomes are large and as yet unexplained. Work characteristics, such as stress, recognition, and autonomy, serve as under-explored mechanisms that may connect education and race to wide-ranging aspects of well being such as mental health, family stability, physical health, and mortality. The newly revamped Dictionary of Occupational Titles (now called O*NET), linked to a data source with measures of health-related outcomes, provides an opportunity to evaluate the utility of occupational characteristics for understanding the mechanisms underlying health disparities. As a test case, we propose to investigate the potential for work characteristics to explain educational and racial disparities in marriage and cohabitation by linking data from the O*NET, 2000 Census, and the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. First, this project will use these sources to create a data set describing work demands, rewards, and demographic composition that can be linked to the NLSY using 2002 census codes. Second, it will link these data to the NLSY to document racial and educational in occupational characteristics in early adulthood. Third, the project will investigate the association between occupational characteristics and women's union formation and whether attributes of occupations are linked to educational and/or racial disparities in marriage and cohabitation. Finally, after having refined our data set through the specific aims 1-3, we will make data set describing occupational demands, rewards, and demographic composition publicly available through the NLSY. This project will serve as a foundation for a larger study exploring the influence of men's and women's work characteristics on family formation and stability.
The New Family Structure Study
Principal Investigator: Mark Regnerus
Funded by: The Witherspoon Institute
The New Family Structure Study (NFSS) is a comparative project which seeks to understand how young adults (~ages 18-39) raised by same-sex parents fare on a variety of social, emotional, and relational outcomes when compared with young adults raised in homes with their married biological parents, those raised with a step-parent, and those raised in homes with two adoptive parents. In particular, the NFSS aims to collect new data in order to evaluate whether biological relatedness and the gender of young adults' parents are associated with important social, emotional, and relational outcomes. Moreover, because there have been no large-scale studies of young adults who have spent time in households with two parents of the same sex, the NFSS seeks to field exactly such a study. Accordingly, the NFSS would provide scholars with an up-to-date portrait of the association between a variety of different family structure background experiences and the welfare of young adults.
Demographic Diversity in Children's Behavioral and Emotional Development
Principal Investigator: Nina Wu
Faculty Sponsor: Robert Crosnoe
Funded by: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
This project involves theoretically grounded research on the co-occurrence of internalizing and externalizing behaviors among children, with a focus on demographic disparities in such co-occurrence. Doing so in a nationally representative framework will inject much-needed awareness of population heterogeneity into theoretical perspectives on developmental psychopathology. Accomplishing the aims of this proposal will help inform educational and health policy by providing research-based evidence about those most in need of intervention (defined by race/ethnicity, gender, and immigration status), and when (timing), where (mechanism and buffering), and how such intervention may be delivered for maximum effectiveness. The project aims will be accomplished by using the The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort and a wide range of longitudinal quantitative methods, including growth curve modeling, mediational models, and logistic regression. Furthermore, in an effort to tackle the selection problems inherent to in non-experimental studies of health, propensity scores will be coupled with post-hoc robustness indices to quantify the vulnerability of results to observable and observable confounds. More specifically, this project will identify the prevalence and timing of childhood trajectories of internalizing and externalizing behaviors, investigate gender, race/ethnic, and immigration-related disparities in the over-time patterns and timing of children's co-occurring behaviors, examine how such co-occurrence is connected to problematic family processes in different demographic groups at different timepoints, and identify school settings that may buffer against family risks contributing to the co-occurrence of the two behaviors across groups. To pursue these aims, the investigator will work under the guidance of a sociologist in an NICHD-funded population center and a trained clinical child psychologist. By identifying critical intervention points for young children's co-occurring behavioral and emotional problems that can have long-term consequences for health and other life course trajectories, determining which segments of the population are at heightened risk, and connecting family problems leading to child maladjustment with potentially compensatory school resources already subject to established policy interventions, this project will promote finer-grained prevention and intervention programs. At the same time, it will give valuable interdisciplinary training to a promising young scholar with a future in population health and developmental research.
