Melvin N. Wilson (University of Virginia) Anthony Chambers (University of Virginia) Karen M. Schmidt (University of Virginia)
Abstract
Recent societal concerns over increasing out-of-wedlock births, mother-only families, and welfare-dependant families have brought the role of fathers to the forefront of the political zeitgeist. Within the broader group of all fathers, research has documented that young, low-income fathers are an important subgroup to study because they have unique experiences that affect their parental involvement which can have deleterious effects on child development. Collectively, little is known about the effects of low-income fathers' presence in the family. Previous research focused on middle class, two parent families. In addition, previous research used the traditional model of viewing families, which included cohabitation, conception, and childbirth all occurring in the context of marriage. However, when studying low-income families, the traditional framework prevents researchers from examining poverty among low-income men who live with their parents or in a different household, and it does not describe the complexity of relationships within never-married families. As an improvement in our knowledge base, the current study proposes a framework that focuses on low-income, never-married African-American couples which consists of children born outside of marriage to disadvantaged parents. This framework uses the never-married African-American couple as the unit of analysis.
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Publisher Info
Paper provided by Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Research on Child Wellbeing. in its series Working Papers with number
973.