Coming and Going: The Effect of Household Composition on the Economic Well-being of Families with Children

As a result of the deinstitutionalization of marriage, high levels of divorce, and an increased acceptance of cohabitation and single parenthood, there is an ever changing array of families in American households (Stacey 1996, Thistle 2006). Current literature examines how different types of households impact the wellbeing of families and children. Whether adults are married, cohabiting, or single has been shown to impact their life chances and those of any children living in their household. Studies have examined changes in composition or household instability to negative outcomes, especially among children. Unfortunately, studies that examine differences in type of family and household composition are often limited to comparisons of unions - married, single, or cohabiting, focusing on the parents. Similarly, the literature on the impact of change in household composition has focused primarily on changes in relationships, such as marriage or divorce. Comparatively less research has been done on the influence of (1) extended family members and non-relatives (roommates, boarders) in the household, and (2) changes in household composition that are not related to union formation among parents. Using data from two waves of the Making Connections Survey, a study of ten disadvantaged urban communities, we examine different types of family and non-family households, the extent of change in household composition when other household members are considered, and differences in the effect of these types of household structures on a variety of economic measures of child wellbeing. We observe differences in household composition beyond the traditional nuclear family and find that there are many types of households not accounted for in conventional family studies. In fact, 45% of households with children in our sample include some adult who is not the parent of the focal child. In addition, we find that these non-traditional households differ along several measures of economic wellbeing. Finally, the results show that changes in the composition of these different households impact their economic stability and, therefore, child wellbeing over time. This research suggests the need for more recognition of these other people in children’s lives and the complex households in which children live

Data Quality in the Retrospective Reporting of Addresses

While tracking the movement of respondents has always been crucial for panel studies, the increasing popularity of geographic analyses has furthered the demand for both accurate and systematic address collection. This paper advances the existing literature on retrospective reporting in surveys by focusing on the collection of respondents‘ past addresses. It features data from the third wave of Making Connections, a ten-year, neighborhood-based survey funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The wave three questionnaire featured a new series that solicited a detailed history of respondents‘ movement during the previous three years. Recovering previous addresses presented challenges beyond those typically associated with the systematic recording of physical addresses because recalling information from the past is inevitably more difficult than describing the present (Kennickell and Starr-McCluer 1997). We designed an experiment to test different methods of maximizing data quality in the retrospective address series collected in 2009 in White Center (Seattle), Washington. Households were randomly assigned to two treatment groups. Addresses collected from the first group underwent administrative data cleaning (using Google Maps, etc.) while those in the second group received intensive follow-up calls by a team of field interviewers and managers. We compare the results of these treatments to the original data collected in White Center and investigate the efficacy of each method for producing addresses that can be successfully translated into geographic coordinates for spatial analyses. We find that the retrieval effort – while more costly to execute – was far more successful in returning ‗geocodable‘ addresses. This supports the argument that successful collection of retrospective addresses depends on an interactive process between the interviewer and respondent involving a variety of probing techniques. Our findings may inform improved methodologies for collecting retrospective data in both panel and cross-sectional surveys