High rates of incarceration in the United States have motivated a far-reaching literature examining the effects of parental incarceration on child wellbeing. Although a growing body of evidence documents challenges facing the children of incarcerated men, most incarcerated fathers lived apart from their children before their arrest, raising the question of whether they were sufficiently involved with their families for their incarceration to affect their children. We use the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N=4,071) to examine father involvement among incarcerated fathers, both…
Sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Building Strong Families (BSF) evaluation used a random assignment research design to test eight voluntary programs that offer relationship skills education and other support services to unwed couples who are expecting or have just had a baby. After three years, the study showed that BSF had no effect on the quality of couples' relationships and did not make them more likely to stay together or get married. (Author abstract)
Sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Building Strong Families (BSF) evaluation used a random assignment research design to test eight voluntary programs that offer relationship skills education and other support services to unwed couples who are expecting or have just had a baby. After three years, the study showed that BSF had no effect on the quality of couples' relationships and did not make them more likely to stay together or get married. (Author abstract)
This report is a technical supplement to the 36-month impact report for the Building Strong Families (BSF) evaluation (Wood et al. 2012). It provides additional detail about the research design (Chapter I), analytic methods (Chapter II), and variable construction (Chapters III, IV and V) that were used for the 36-month analysis. Chapter VI of this report provides a discussion of the subgroup analysis that was conducted. Chapter VII discusses the treatment-on-the-treated (TOT) impact analysis, an analysis of BSF's effects on couples who actually attended BSF group sessions. The full set of…
This report synthesizes the facilitated discussions from the National Resource Center for Healthy Marriage and Families Peer-to-Peer Networking Forum, held in Washington, DC, on July 18 - 19, 2012. This report includes background information on healthy marriage and relationship education and summarizes Forum discussions around implementation, challenges to integration, and opportunities for collaboration and partnership. It also highlights tools and products available through the Resource Center to support integration efforts. (Author abstract)
This tool provides information on free and low-cost healthy marriage and relationship education curricula that are research-based and suitable for integration into safety-net service delivery systems. For the purposes of this review, "low-cost" is defined as costing less than $300.00 for facilitator materials and up to 20 participants. (Author abstract)
The catalog of research on programs for low-income couples contains summaries of studies that describe and analyze marriage and relationship education or other couple-based programs. Each study description provides details on the research, such as study design and characteristics of those included in the sample, and of the programs, such as structure, staffing and operations, and recruitment and retention. Also included in each study description is a rating based on the likelihood that the estimated effects are the result of the program rather than other factors. (Author abstract)
This summary provides a brief overview of the catalog of research on programs for low-income couples, which compiles information from 54 studies of 39 programs.
Counting Couples, Counting Families Executive Summary provides an overview of the research conference that occurred on July 19-21, 2011. The materials in the full report are a culmination of the third Counting Couples conference in 2011 and two previous national conferences in 2001 and 2003 detailing comprehensive recommendations to facilitate standardization of family measurement across surveys. Sessions on marriage and remarriage, cohabitation, family structure and instability, family ties across households, and future directions provided rich insights into issues that need to be considered…
