Scholars agree that understanding of family is incomplete without attention to context. Research and theory establish that neighborhoods are a proximal context for family life. However, research on the connections between neighborhoods and family processes remains limited in several ways. The overarching goal of this paper is to advance on existing knowledge of neighborhoods and families to elucidate key issues for future research. This paper begins with a brief review of existing theory and research on the connections between neighborhoods and families. Building on prior work, this paper then introduces a set of conceptually and methodologically driven questions that address limitations in: (1) how neighborhood qualities, as they relate to family wellbeing, are currently defined and measured, (2) how neighborhood effects are transmitted and if there are mutual influences between neighborhood and family processes, and (3) how transmission between neighborhoods and families varies according to sociocultural characteristics. These questions outline initial steps in clarifying and synthesizing previous conceptualizations and empirical study of neighborhoods and family dynamics. In addition, these ideas bring attention to understudied factors in research on neighborhoods and families and offer suggestions for future investigations.
With needed and growing attention to sexual minorities and unmarried individuals, there is a need to consider how best to capture relationships and relationship organization in family studies.
Traditional measures of marital status are commonly used to examine differences in relationships and socioeconomic outcomes, but they do not adequately capture the diversity of relationship experiences and leave certain types of relationship experiences invisible.
This article examines the inclusion of a relationship measure in the American Marriage Survey, a national probability-based sample of 2806 adults in the United States, to provide a more diverse and expansive perspective on relationships and relationship organization. While there is a great deal of overlap between those who are married or cohabiting (marital status) and those who are in an exclusive relationship (relationship status), there is also potential for variation in what kinds of relationships, if any, people are in.
We find that the relationship measure is particularly useful in showing that a majority of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and pansexual individuals are in an exclusive relationship and also that gender and sexual minorities are more likely than cisgender and heterosexual individuals to be in consensual nonmonogamous relationships. This article also provides direction on re-coding open text responses from the relationship status measure.
We conclude that a relationship status measure allows for greater inclusivity and visibility of sexual minorities and unmarried persons, including but not limited to queer individuals, families, and communities, as well as consensual nonmonogamous relationships.
Family science has been slow to incorporate critical race theory (CRT) into research on family experiences and outcomes. Discussions of CRT often reduce it to one idea when it is comprised of several key tenets, including the social construction of race, racism as normal and commonplace, critiques of the liberal state, interest convergence, counterstorytelling, intersectionality and anti-essentialism, and Whiteness as a form of property. CRT scholars share the aim of investigating the creation, maintenance, and reproduction of regimes of White supremacy that subordinate people of color, and how such regimes might be transformed. Responding to amplified attention to racial injustices and structural racism, The National Council on Family Relations journals published special issues in 2022, inviting family scholars to submit scholarship engaging with a range of critical frameworks examining racial inequities within families, including CRT. However, many family scientists have limited exposure to CRT in their training and know little about its origins, tenets, applications, and contributions to various disciplines. There is also little understanding of the consequences of not using CRT approaches to enhance our understanding of families and what can be gained from using it. This article describes CRT's origins and key tenets scholars use in their research alongside examples of family science and related research using CRT to examine the impact of structural racism and racial inequality on the family. The article concludes by discussing how a more robust and sustained engagement with the analytical, methodological, and theoretical frameworks of CRT would enhance our understanding of families.
Family science is grappling with the legacy of White supremacy embedded in its theories and methodologies. This presents an opportunity to move beyond traditional theoretical perspectives and statistical approaches that have perpetuated racist assumptions about the inferiority of people of color compared to White Americans. We build on Curtis et al.'s (2022) introduction of Quantitative Criticalism by presenting quantitative critical race theory (QuantCrit) as a critical framework that combines quantitative methods and critical race theory (CRT) to examine issues of racism and race in social science research. Specifically, we (1) make an argument for why QuantCrit is needed in family science, (2) review and critique conventional approaches family scientists have used to analyze racial inequality within the family sciences, (3) offer QuantCrit as an alternative and critical strategy for the quantitative study of racial inequality in family research, and (4) provide examples of how family scientists can leverage QuantCrit to subvert underlying assumptions and practices that perpetuate continued marginalization. We discuss recent research that exhibits elements of QuantCrit in family research to showcase the value of an emerging subfield. QuantCrit provides an opportunity for family scientists studying racial inequality to promote theories, methodological strategies, and policies rooted in social justice.
To discuss how methods to estimate heterogenous causal effects can be applied in Family Science and to supply empirical examples using the case of fatherhood and earnings.
Many questions important to family scientists do not focus on one-size-fits-all average effects but rather on whether and how effects differ across groups. Recent methodological advances can assist this latter focus, offering new insights for theory and policy.
Using Danish administrative data on all men who entered fatherhood 2005–2016 and on men of comparable age who did not, we focus on two types of heterogeneity in effects. First, effect heterogeneity across observed and unobserved covariates; second, treatment effect heterogeneity across the distribution of outcome variables.
The fatherhood premium on annual labor income is, in fact, a fatherhood penalty on average and across most margins of heterogeneity. Substantial heterogeneity exists across observed and unobserved characteristics and across the distribution of labor market earnings, with results indicating larger penalties for lower earners and those least likely to become fathers.
Effect heterogeneity in Family Science holds great potential to inform policy and theory. However, causal interpretations always require assumptions, and researchers must be vigilant that the assumptions they make are warranted for each specific application.
We propose a life course theoretical framework for understanding variation in family life courses between birth cohorts (historical time), societies (place), and social groups (social location). Building on the life course paradigm, we explain how key predictors on different levels of analysis can reinforce, precondition, counteract, preclude, or alter each other's influence on family life courses in specific contexts. The proposed framework re-organizes and extends core principles of the life course paradigm into family life course predictors and outcomes on the individual, relational, and population levels.
The life course approach is a well-recognized interdisciplinary paradigm in family research but often remains too abstract to guide hypotheses about family life course variation.
We demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework with a qualitative case study on family life courses in Senegal and a quantitative case study on family life course change between Baby Boomer and Millennial cohorts in the United States using sequence analysis.
Findings of the two example applications support that fertility decline in Senegal was primarily driven by material considerations and not by ideational change and that family life course de-standardization was greater between White Baby Boomers and Millennials compared to Black Boomers and Millennials.
Developing narrower mid-range theories that fill the basic life course principles with substantive content and target specific fields of application, such as family life courses, is promising to advance life course theory.
Drawing on life course frameworks, this study examines how never married older adults differ from their married, cohabiting, divorced, and widowed peers with respect to three dimensions of late-life economic security, and gender differences in these associations.
Lifelong singlehood has become increasingly common over the past five decades, although little is known about the economic security of never married older adults relative to their currently and formerly married peers.
Data are from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), which tracked Wisconsin high school graduates from ages 18 (1957) to 72 (2011). The 2011 analytic sample includes 5269 persons (2498 men and 2711 women). OLS and logistic regressions are used to predict total household income, wealth, and poverty status at age 72, adjusted for covariates.
Lifelong single men have higher poverty rates and lower income than men in all other marital categories, although divorced men evidence the lowest levels of wealth. Lifelong single women fare worse than married and cohabiting women but better than divorced women. Older men are more financially secure than women in every marital status category except lifelong singles.
By centering the experiences of never married older adults, results reveal the economic precarity of lifelong single men and distinctions among subgroups of unmarried women. We document the persistence of gender inequality, where men consistently fare better than women across marital statuses.
Public policies should recognize growing heterogeneity in older adults' marital statuses and the implications thereof for their late-life economic security.
Researchers have long documented the impact of social inequalities on family life. Most family research has focused on inequalities at the individual and family levels, and extant studies on macro-level conditions have primarily examined economic conditions and specific family-focused social policies. Yet, an emerging body of largely conceptual research suggests that structural inequities also have enormous power to shape families. Structural racism, structural sexism, and structural sexual and gender minority oppression, and other forms of structural injustice operate across various levels (macro, meso, and micro) and systems (e.g., educational, economic, political, criminal-legal, etc.), to influence individuals' social environments and everyday lives in ways that may impact how, when, and where people form families. Structural oppression, moreover, may influence relationship quality, caregiving patterns, child outcomes, and various other aspects of family life. Yet, the consequences of these structural forces for families have not yet been thoroughly examined. In this article, we (1) develop a conceptual framework linking structural oppression to family characteristics and outcomes, (2) outline innovative approaches for conceptualizing and measuring structural oppression and describe how incorporating these approaches can move the field of family science forward, and (3) make several recommendations regarding best practices and fruitful avenues for future research.
Although family scholars have long relied on longitudinal data, electronic methods of data collection like web- and app-based surveys have greatly increased the amount of data with many repeated measures at short intervals, sometimes called intensive longitudinal data. The authors provide a conceptual overview of this type of data, paying particular attention to the appropriate frequency for the intervals, and discuss some of the unique contributions to Life Course Theory that can be generated with such data. They illustrate two analytic techniques that especially benefit from an intensive longitudinal design—sequence analysis and between-within regression—by applying these methods to intensive longitudinal data from the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life Study that represent a “micro life course” of pregnancy risk (partnering, pregnancy desire, sex, and contraception) during the transition to adulthood. Their sequence analysis shows that singlehood, hormonal contraception, or partnered abstinence dominated most young women's micro-life courses. Black/African-American young women's micro life courses were similarly dominated by singlehood but were even more frequently dominated by partnered abstinence than their non-Black/African-American peers'. However, Black/African-American women's micro life courses were less stable, potentially explaining their higher undesired pregnancy rates. A between-within regression model shows that Black/African-American coital contraceptors were less likely than their non-Black/African-American peers to use withdrawal (rather than condoms). They conclude by suggesting some potential ways that intensive longitudinal data capturing micro-life courses can contribute to important outstanding research questions in family research.
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