Poverty and single-mother family structure are twin problems that have negative outcomes for today's American children. But exactly how do poverty and family structure interact to affect these outcomes? Can these outcomes be mitigated or exacerbated by the strategies mothers use to cope with constraints that single mother hood imposes? And what determines which coping strategies? To answer these questions the investigators have developed a framework to investigate how single mothers choose coping strategies and how this choice affect children's developmental outcomes. The study assumes that (1) coping strategies are not uni-dimensional; rather they combine maternal employment, public assistance and social support; (2) single mother's choices of coping strategies are affected primarily by the availability of different strategies and the needs of the family which are ultimately determined by conditions of the labor market, provision of welfare and child care policies, characteristics of the family's social networks, the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the family; and (3) children's developmental outcomes vary by the coping strategy chosen.
The specific aims are to (1) characterize different coping strategies; (2) examine whether labor market opportunities, public policies and social networks reinforce or substitute for one another in determining mother's choice of coping strategies; (3) examine how mothers' maternal employment, public assistance and social support interact with one another in the production of child development; and (4) estimate the sensitivity of the estimated effects to the endogeneity of coping strategies (by both instrumental variable methods and covariance structure methods), to the individual-specific heterogeneity (by change models and random-effect models based on longitudinal observations of individuals), and to the selectivity of single motherhood (by a switching simultaneous equations system). The study will use the two- round National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), complemented by the 14-round National Longitudinal Survey of youth (NLSY) with the 4-round matched child-mother file. The longitudinal nature of both data sets, the five-year span in the NSFH and four two-year spans in the NLSY, allow us to pool longitudinal observations, which increases sample sizes, and permits the proposed analyses.
