Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Family Instability

From Family Studies:
On Monday in this space, I described findings from the 2017 World Family Map report and included the scatter plot below showing how a rising share of births to cohabiting couples corresponds to a declining share of children later living with both biological parents.

Many were less than impressed because of the wide scatter of the points and the shallow slope of the trend line. This criticism is fair: the proportion of the variance in the change in children’s living arrangements explained by the rise in cohabiting births was only 4 percent. When I did a better job of adjusting for the fact that children’s living arrangements were measured at various ages (I added an age cubed term to the adjustment equation), it didn’t change the fact that little of the variance was explained. (Read more.)
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