Previous studies examining children's adjustment in stepfamilies have yielded conflicting results. Some find that children living in stepfamilies are less positively adjusted than are their counterparts in intact families, while others report no differences. These conflicting results may be due to investigators' failure to consider the mediating influence of parental work and family roles on children's adjustment. This project is designed to determine the extent to which work and family roles, i.e., mothers' labor force participation, hours and schedule of work, and household division of labor, influence the adjustment of children in stepfamilies. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses will be used to assess the relative contribution of work and family roles, above and beyond family structure, to child adjustment. The analysis will include main respondents and spouses in intact first marriages and remarried families with children under 18 years of age in the household. The project is a secondary analysis of data from the 1987/1988 National Survey of Families and Households conducted by the Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison. The data set contains large, representative samples of stepfamilies and intact families and a number of items assessing child adjustment and work and family roles.
