The objective of this project is to determine the consequences of recent changes in Western families for the living arrangements of children and to identify the socioeconomic characteristics of the children most at risk of experiencing time in a single parent or cohabiting-parent family. The project is motivated by the lower well-being of children raised outside of traditional, married parent households and the surprising dearth of cross-national research on socioeconomic differentials in family structure. The main hypotheses I will examine are that, across countries, more socioeconomically disadvantaged children will have greater exposure to non-traditional families, but cultural and policy differences between countries will modify the relationship between socioeconomic status and family structure. The findings from this project will provide researchers with comparable estimates of educational differentials in a variety of countries, information that will help them begin to identify the factors contributing to the rise in non-traditional families. My analysis will use event history techniques and multistate life tables to describe children's living arrangements in a variety of wealthy countries, focusing particularly on countries with new data available for family research. ? ? ?
| Kennedy, Sheela; Thomson, Elizabeth (2010) Children's experiences of family disruption in Sweden: Differentials by parent education over three decades. Demogr Res 23:479-508 |
| Kennedy, Sheela; Bumpass, Larry (2008) Cohabitation and children's living arrangements: New estimates from the United States. Demogr Res 19:1663-1692 |
