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Project Description

The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study investigates two critical prongs of the new Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA): 1) The TANF work requirements and time limits; and 2) the stricter paternity establishment and child support enforcement regulations. These two policies will be studied together along with labor market conditions since the effects are expected to be interactive. The new data will document the implementation of reform from the parents' perspective, and will reveal the extent to which parents are aware of the many rules, regulations, and incentives that are embedded in the process. Investigators will be able to examine the complicated relationships among work, welfare, child care, child support, and self-sufficiency for the population most associated with long-term welfare dependence. And, since the study will provide data across cities with diverse policy regimes and labor market conditions, it represents a step toward making causal inferences about the effects of public policies on family, processes and child well-being.

Project duration: Jan 1997 - Jun 2006

Sites studied include Austin, Texas
Baltimore, Maryland*
Boston, Massachusetts
Chicago, Illinois
Corpus Christi, Texas
Detroit, Michigan*
Indianapolis, Indiana
Jacksonville, Florida
Milwaukee, Wisconsin*
Nashville, Tennessee
Newark, New Jersey*
New York, New York
Oakland, California*
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Richmond, Virginia
San Antonio, Texas
San Jose, California*
Toledo, Ohio
Norfolk, Virginia

*=not included in the national sample for the National Institute for Child Health and Development

Sample Characteristics and Sites Studied

The sample is comprised of births in a total of 20 U.S. cities with populations over 200,000, including 3, 712 non-marital births and 1,186 marital births. Approximately half of the sample is non-Hispanic black and a third is Hispanic.
Time, Love, Cash, Couples, and Children Study:
This qualitative sub-study uses 75 couples (one man, one woman) from the sample of Fragile Families.

Recent Findings in Brief

02/28/05: Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study: The Risk of Divorce as a Barrier to Marriage

Interim Descriptive/Analytical Findings

• Results indicate that married parents are more likely to dissolve their relationships when they were younger, had less education, experienced a high level of conflict in their relationship, and when the father has been abusive to the mother among other factors.
• Qualitative information from a subset of unmarried parents in the study suggests that they delayed marriage when they identified these “warning signs” of divorce in their relationships.
• regression results show that unmarried parents with a high predicted probability of divorce had significantly and substantially lower odds of marriage even after taking other factors strongly related to marriage into account. Based on this evidence, we conclude that unmarried parents delay marriage when they perceive a high risk of divorce.

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