Nearly 40% of all births in the United States today occur to parents who are not legally married. Over the last ten years, the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFS) has emerged as an important tool in research on the capabilities of, and challenges facing unmarried parents with children, often referred to as """"""""fragile families."""""""" The FFS is a nationally representative, longitudinal, birth cohort survey of children born between 1998 and 2001 in 20 large American cities, with a large oversample of births to unmarried couples. The data are uniquely rich in repeated measures of four domains of family resources - economic, parent relations, heath, and parenting and three domains of child development - physical health, socio-emotional wellbeing, and cognitive development. This proposal seeks funds for the development and implementation of a three-day workshop in the summer of 2012, which will train junior population researchers from a variety of disciplines on the use of the Fragile Families data. These workshops will result in the dissemination of the Fragile Families data, an improved understanding of the issues facing fragile families, and opportunities for mentorship and collaboration for a new generation of social and biomedical scientists.
This proposal seeks funds to develop and operate a summer workshop to train a diverse group of early- career scholars on the use of data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. The workshop will present substantive findings from the data, discuss the measurement of key constructs for population research, and provide hands-on training with the Fragile Families data. In so doing, the proposed workshop will support a cohort of emerging scholars and further the understanding of behavioral and social functioning relevant to the health and wellbeing of children and families.
