This is a request for a small grant in order to establish a solid empirical basis for future projects that will seek relevant economic, value, social, and policy correlates of similarities and differences in how unmarried childbearing, cohabitation, and union stability differentially impact the stability of children's family lives. It builds on the Principal Investigator's prior work in examining these processes to better understand the changing meaning of marriage. The significance of trends in family transitions, for both social policy and our scientific understanding of changing family life, hinges on the presence of children. The objective of the proposed work is to document the consequences across societies of changing nonunion birth, births in cohabiting unions, and union formation and dissolution, on the living-arrangement experiences of children. The analysis will begin with Awomen based"""""""" estimates of childbearing while single or cohabiting, and the Anew"""""""" measures of divorce and union disruption for unions with children. Then children's life-course estimates will be prepared of the cumulative experience by age of cohabitation, marriage given cohabitation, marriage given unmarried birth, marital disruption, union disruption, and remarriage (reunion) given marital (union) disruption. As a final summary measure, period multistate lifetable procedures will be used to estimate the proportion of childhood spent in a one-parent family, a cohabiting family, and a married family. The final stage will involve the examination of age and education differences in key processes, given the strong relationship between single-parent experience and mother's education and age in the United States. Variation in the stability and character of children's family contexts will also be examined in relationship to variations across countries in the levels of the component processes. Countries will be grouped according to similarities with respect to age and education effects and multivariate analysis will be explored in the spirit of multiple standardization. These pooled analyses will be done for both the women and the children files using hazard analyses for the 5-year period before interview and predicting key transitions that move children into and out of single-parent families. The next phase of this project, for which an R01 submission is anticipated, will move towards adding substantive variables to help understand the patterns and level uncovered. The current R03 project would provide a solid empirical basis for selecting key countries and a beginning search for data on the employment of young women, economic circumstances of young people, housing markets, family support policies and other relevant variables in the attempt to understand when cohabitation is associated with greater instability in children's lives (as it is in the U.S.) and when it may not be so.
