Unpublished Paper
The negative effects of incarceration on child well-being are often linked to the economic insecurity of formerly incarcerated parents. Researchers caution, however, that the effects of parental incarceration may be small in the presence of multiple partner fertility and other family complexity. Despite these claims, few studies directly observe either economic insecurity or the full extent of family complexity. We study parent-child relationships with a unique data set that includes detailed information about economic insecurity and family complexity among parents just released from prison.…
Unpublished Paper
The structure of marriage and child-rearing in U.S. households has undergone two marked shifts in the last three decades: a steep decline in the prevalence of marriage among young adults, and a sharp rise in the fraction of children born to unmarried mothers or living in single-headed households. A potential contributor to both phenomena is the declining labor-market opportunities faced by males, which make them less valuable as marital partners. We exploit large scale, plausibly exogenous labor-demand shocks stemming from rising international manufacturing competition to test how shifts in…
Unpublished Paper
The purpose of this study was to fill a gap in our knowledge regarding father involvement in informal kinship care and its impact on the emotional and behavioral wellbeing of children in care. Although this study was neither exclusively a fatherhood nor a child welfare study, it has the potential to contribute to the knowledge base of each area. The study was guided by the principles of family systems theory, which highlight the interconnectedness of family members and the ways in which family interactions impact individual wellbeing. This study specifically explored the relationship between…
Unpublished Paper
The present study examined the influence that father's residency status and father-child relational qualities have on adolescent psychological adjustment, behavioral outcomes, scholastic achievement, self-identity acculturation, and the subjective well-being of Chinese male immigrants from intact, two-parent households. The relational qualities of interest under investigation consisted of father-son attachment, father involvement, and father acceptance-rejection, from the phenomenological perception of children. A total of 86 participants were included in the overall multivariate analyses -…
Unpublished Paper
There are approximately 1.8 million U.S. children with at least one parent in the military (Department of Defense, 2010). Maintaining an all-volunteer military force has led to an increase in older, career military members that are more likely to have children (RAND, 2010). Due to extended military commitments and recent deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, the need to understand the impact of deployment and military work commitments on children and family relationships has come to the forefront. While a number of studies have explored the influence of deployment and a military lifestyle on…
Unpublished Paper
Few empirical studies address the lived experience of single African American fathers. Research has been conducted on African American fathers with respect to their lack of presence in the lives of their children, the negative effects to children due to their absence, lack of provision for their children, and child support issues (Bronte-Tinkew, Scott, & Lilia, 2010; Coles, 2009a; Gursimsek, 2003; Krampe & Newton, 2006). However, there is little in the literature about African American fathers who choose to parent alone. The literature from affirming works was explored to counter the…
Unpublished Paper
Guided by ecological resilience perspectives this study examined the association between various risk factors (neighborhood risk, discrimination, peer victimization, fathers' risk behaviors) and African American and Latino adolescent boys' physical and relational aggression. Fathers' parenting behaviors were examined primarily as mediators and moderators of those associations to determine how they might exacerbate or protect against those risks. Both adolescents and their fathers reported on fathers' parenting behaviors. Data were collected from 234 adolescents (mean age of 15.17, 34.2%…
Unpublished Paper
The United States greatly expanded the use of incarceration as a criminal sanction during the last three decades. Researchers have begun to examine the effects of incarceration on the socioeconomic outcomes of people who have spent time behind bars. This study uses data collected for the Fragile Families Study to examine the effects of incarceration on earnings, employment, marriage and cohabitation for a cohort of new fathers in Oakland, California and Austin, Texas. We examine the extent to which the disruptive features of incarceration retard and impede the development and accumulation of…
Unpublished Paper
This study investigated the quality of parenting among men who abused their wives. Data were collected from 92 men referred to battering intervention programs about variables that predicted child maltreatment, including batterers' age, history of maltreatment during childhood, exposure to the abuse of their mother, substance abuse, child's age and gender, number of children, and frequency and severity of spouse abuse. The parenting skills of the men were assessed and rated as violent, nonviolent, or positive. In addition, the wives of 16 of the men were also asked to assess parenting and…
Unpublished Paper
The Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study is designed to collect information about the men who father children outside marriage and the nature of their relationships with their children and their children's mothers. The research will follow a new birth cohort of approximately 4,700 children, including 3,600 children born to unmarried parents representative of nonmarital births in each of 20 cities and in U.S. cities with populations over 200,000. Both mothers and fathers will be followed for at least 4 years, and in-home assessments of children's health and development will be carried…
