Kathryn Edin
Biographic Data
| ID | 91380 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kathryn Edin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kathryn |
| FAMILY NAME | Edin |
| SIGNATURE | EDIN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0009-0009-2071-8339 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1290 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Three Decades Since Making Ends Meet: How Single-Mother Families Survive Today
In their 1997 book Making Ends Meet , Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein revealed how struggling single mothers strategized to support their families as the deepest welfare reform since the 1930s began. Upending arguments that cash assistance incentivized dependency and single parenthood, their book sparked decades of scholarship on families’ actual living conditions and survival strategies. We introduce this issue by describing how the safety net, and …
Three Decades Since Making Ends Meet: How Single-Mother Families Survive Today
In their 1997 book Making Ends Meet , Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein revealed how struggling single mothers strategized to support their families as the deepest welfare reform since the 1930s began. Upending arguments that cash assistance incentivized dependency and single parenthood, their book sparked decades of scholarship on families’ actual living conditions and survival strategies. We introduce this issue by describing how the safety net, and …
The Parallel Declines of Intergenerational Economic Mobility and Marriage: Are They Related
Intergenerational mobility declined in the second half of the 20th century—simultaneously with the decline in marriage rates and the rise of single parenthood. This study investigated whether county-level intergenerational mobility rates predict family formation patterns. We utilized a county-level measure of intergenerational mobility constructed by Chetty and Hendren for a cohort of young adults born between 1980 and 1986 and raised in lower-in…
The making of an epidemic of pain
Chronic pain in the United States has increased rapidly in recent decades. Social scientists argue that increases in pain are tied to economic conditions, but how the two are related remains a mystery. We draw on 96 immersive interviews with disability recipients and community leaders in one county in Central Appalachia to advance the hypothesis that “social pain”—or the painful feelings resulting from social disconnection—is a critical link betw…
Other adults in the United States: Improving survey measures of youths' non-parental adult relationships
ObjectiveThis study uses in-depth interview data to investigate the impact of non-parental, "other adults" (OAs) on youth development and highlights the importance of better measuring OAs' contributions through the nation's survey infrastructure.BackgroundExtant survey measures of youths' social relationships were developed in an anomalous historical period of nuclear family dominance. We argue that these measures do not capture the demographic a…
Earning the Role: Father Role Institutionalization and the Achievement of Contemporary Fatherhood
Fatherhood has become an achieved status among complex, disadvantaged families. Stepfathers may have an advantage over nonresident biological fathers in earning the father role; in-depth interview studies reveal that nonresident fathers are often stripped of the father label while stepfathers commonly achieve it instead. This stepfather advantage is surprising given extant institutionalization theory, which suggests that the stronger institutiona…
Listening to the Voices of America
We make the case for building a permanent public-use platform for conducting and analyzing immersive interviews on the everyday lives of Americans. The American Voices Project (AVP)—a widely watched experiment with this new platform—provides important early evidence on its promise. The articles in this issue reveal that, although public-use interview datasets obviously cannot meet all research needs, they do provide new opportunities to study sma…
Direct and Indirect Longitudinal Associations of Mother and Father Engagement in Middle Childhood on Adolescent Externalizing and Internalizing Behaviors
Re-thinking Stepfathers' Contributions: Fathers, Stepfathers, and Child Wellbeing
Using data from a contemporary cohort of children, we revisit the question of whether children benefit from being close to and engaging in activities with a stepfather. We deploy the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a birth cohort study of nearly 5000 children born in US cities in 1998-2000, with a large oversample of nonmarital births. We explore the relationships between stepfathers' closeness and active engagement and youth's intern…
Coming of Age in Appalachia, Emerging or Expedited Adulthood
We examine the transition to adulthood in a poor, white, rural community in Appalachia. Young adults come of age in a context of persistent poverty, economic decline, an ongoing opioid and addiction crisis, and strong community norms about family and work bolstered by religious institutions. For low-income young adults in this community, this stage in the life course is both expedited and emerging. Marriage and childbearing are expedited, frequen…
The regional employment effects of new social firm entry
As a contribution to research and theorizing on the economic role of new firm formation, we undertake the first ever investigation of regional employment effects of the entry of new social firms. Our study is guided by an established model of the employment effects of new firm entry over time and provides a direct comparison to the employment effects of commercial entrants. Our results show that the net employment effect of new social firms follo…
Forever Homes and Temporary Stops: Housing Search Logics and Residential Selection
Residential selection is central in determining children’s housing, neighborhood, and school contexts, and an extensive literature considers the social processes that shape residential searches and attainment. While this literature typically frames the residential search as a uniform process oriented around finding residential options with desired characteristics, we examine whether individuals may differentially conceive of these searches in way…
Eviction in early childhood and neighborhood poverty, food security, and obesity in later childhood and adolescence: Evidence from a longitudinal birth cohort
Eviction affects a substantial share of U.S. children, but its effects on child health are largely unknown. Our objectives were to examine how eviction relates to 1) children's health and sociodemographic characteristics at birth, 2) neighborhood poverty and food security at age 5, and 3) obesity in later childhood and adolescence. We analyzed data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal cohort of children born in 20 l…
Severe Housing Insecurity during Pregnancy: Association with Adverse Birth and Infant Outcomes
Introduction: Housing insecurity is increasingly commonplace among disadvantaged women and children. We measured the individual- and population-level impact of severe housing insecurity during pregnancy on adverse birth and infant outcomes. Methods: We analyzed data from 3428 mother-infant dyads enrolled in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a prospective cohort study representing births in 20 large U.S. cities from 1998 to 2000. Sev…
Does Time with Dad in Childhood Pay Off in Adolescence
ObjectiveWe aim to understand the association between father involvement in middle childhood and adolescent behaviors and whether the relationship differs by father residence.BackgroundInternalizing and externalizing behaviors in adolescence can trigger a cascade of negative outcomes later in life, including lower educational attainment, criminal justice involvement, and future psychological distress. Evidence, largely focusing on nonresidential …
Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage
Millie Acevedo bore her first child before the age of 16 and dropped out of high school to care for her newborn. Now 27, she is the unmarried mother of three and is raising her kids in one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods. Would she and her children be better off if she had waited to have them and had married their father first? Why do so many poor American youth like Millie continue to have children before they can afford to take care of …
It's Not Like I'm Poor: How Working Families Make Ends Meet in a Post-Welfare World
The world of welfare has changed radically. As the poor trade welfare checks for low-wage jobs, their low earnings qualify them for a hefty check come tax time—a combination of the earned income tax credit and other refunds. For many working parents this one check is like hitting the lottery, offering several months’ wages as well as the hope of investing in a better future. Drawing on interviews with 115 families, the authors look at how parents…
Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City
Across the political spectrum, unwed fatherhood is denounced as one of the leading social problems of today. Doing the Best I Can is a strikingly rich, paradigm-shifting look at fatherhood among inner-city men often dismissed as "deadbeat dads." Kathryn Edin and Timothy J. Nelson examine how couples in challenging straits come together and get pregnant so quickly—without planning. The authors chronicle the high hopes for forging lasting family bo…
The Decline of Cash Assistance and the Well-Being of Poor Households with Children
Since the early 1990s, the social safety net for families with children in the United States has undergone an epochal transformation. Aid to poor working families has become more generous. In contrast, assistance to the deeply poor has become less generous, and what remains more often takes the form of in-kind aid. A historical view finds that this dramatic change parallels others. For centuries, the nature and form of poor relief has been driven…
Taking Care of Mine: Can Child Support Become a Family‐Building Institution
U.S. children are more likely to live apart from a biological parent than at any time in history. Although the Child Support Enforcement system has tremendous reach, its policies have not kept pace with significant economic, demographic, and cultural changes. Narrative analysis of in-depth interviews with 429 low-income noncustodial fathers suggests that the system faces a crisis of legitimacy. Visualization of language used to describe all forms…
The Tenuous Attachments of Working-Class Men
In this essay, we explore how working-class men describe their attachments to work, family, and religion. We draw upon in-depth, life history interviews conducted in four metropolitan areas with racially and ethnically diverse groups of working-class men with a high school diploma but no four-year college degree. Between 2000 and 2013, we deployed heterogeneous sampling techniques in the black and white working-class neighborhoods of Boston, Mass…
As Good as Money in the Bank: Building a Personal Safety Net with the Earned Income Tax Credit
The public safety net has increasingly functioned as a system that rewards work, but many low-wage workers now face a double bind: unstable incomes and volatile expenses. We ask how low-wage workers make resource allocation decisions under conditions of uncertainty by examining how they spend and save their tax refunds. Using data from in-depth interviews with a sample of 115 lower-income working families, we find that more than three quarters of…
The Rainy Day Earned Income Tax Credit: A Reform to Boost Financial Security by Helping Low-Wage Workers Build Emergency Savings
Sarah Halpern-Meekin, Sara Sternberg Greene, Ezra Levin, Kathryn Edin, The Rainy Day Earned Income Tax Credit: A Reform to Boost Financial Security by Helping Low-Wage Workers Build Emergency Savings, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 4, No. 2, Anti-Poverty Policy Initiatives for the United States (February 2018), pp. 161-176
A Universal Child Allowance: A Plan to Reduce Poverty and Income Instability Among Children in the United States
To reduce child poverty and income instability, and eliminate extreme poverty among families with children in the United States, we propose converting the Child Tax Credit and child tax exemption into a universal, monthly child allowance. Our proposal is based on principles we argue should undergird the design of such policies: universality, accessibility, adequate payment levels, and more generous support for young children. Whether benefits sho…
Relationship Repertoires, the Price of Parenthood, and the Costs of Contraception
Drawing on 150 in-depth interviews with African American male and female youth who have spent much of their lives in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, we explore the structural and cultural underpinnings of the elevated rate of unplanned childbearing among disadvantaged youth. We find that gender asymmetry in perceived opportunity costs, shared social meanings associated with condom use, and perceptions of health risk associated with hormona…
High Hopes but Even Higher Expectations: The Retreat From Marriage Among Low-Income Couples
This study examines why low-income, unmarried parents who say that they plan to marry at the time their child is born do not follow through on their plans. We use data from a nationally representative birth cohort survey-the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N =3,710)-combined with data from an embedded qualitative study-Time, Love, Cash, Caring, and Children (n =47)-to explore the reasons behind this apparent discrepancy. We find that …
What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say about Marriage
A primary goal of the landmark 1996 welfare reform legislation is to increase marriage rates among unskilled women with children. Current theories of marriage under-predict the extent of non-marriage, have not been adequately tested, or do not apply well to women with low-socioeconomic status. Furthermore, scholarly work on marriage attitudes among low-SES women suffers from a lack of up-to-date qualitative work. This study draws on qualitative i…
Work, Welfare, and Single Mothers' Economic Survival Strategies
Past efforts to conceptualize the effects of welfare on work have failed to consider the full range of incentives and disincentives that low-skill single mothers perceive and act upon when making the choice between welfare and work. They also have neglected the fundamental economic reality of these mothers' lives-neither welfare nor low-wage work gives single mothers enough income to meet their families'expenses. In-depth interviews with 379 low-…
Parenting as a “package deal”: Relationships, fertility, and nonresident father involvement among unmarried parents
Fatherhood has traditionally been viewed as part of a “package deal” in which a father’s relationship with his child is contingent on his relationship with the mother. We evaluate the accuracy of this hypothesis in light of the high rates of multiple-partner fertility among unmarried parents using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a recent longitudinal survey ofnonmarital births in large cities. We examine whether unmarried mothers’…
Dignity and Dreams: What the Earned Income Tax Credit (Eitc) Means to Low-Income Families
Money has meaning that shapes its uses and social significance, including the monies low-income families draw on for survival: wages, welfare, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). This study, based on in-depth interviews with 115 low-wage EITC recipients, reveals the EITC is an unusual type of government transfer. Recipients of the EITC say they value the debt relief this government benefit brings. However, they also perceive it as a just rew…
Claiming Fatherhood: Race and the Dynamics of Paternal Involvement among Unmarried Men
In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the black family was nearing “complete breakdown” due to high rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing. In subsequent decades, nonmarital childbearing rose dramatically for all racial groups and unwed fathers were often portrayed as being absent from their children's lives. The authors examine contemporary nonmarital father involvement using quantitative evidence from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbei…
Moving Teenagers Out of High-Risk Neighborhoods: How Girls Fare Better than Boys
Moving to Opportunity (MTO) offered public housing residents the opportunity to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. Several years later, boys in the experimental group fared no better on measures of risk behavior than their control group counterparts, whereas girls in the experimental group engaged in lower-risk behavior than control group girls. The authors explore these differences by analyzing data from in-depth interviews conducted with 86 tee…
A peek inside the black box: What marriage means for poor unmarried parents
Rising Extreme Poverty in the United States and the Response of Federal Means-Tested Transfer Programs
This study documents an increase in the prevalence of extreme poverty among US households with children between 1996 and 2011 and assesses the response of major federal means-tested transfer programs. Extreme poverty is defined using a World Bank metric of global poverty: $2 or less, per person, per day. Using the 1996–2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we estimate that in mid-2011, 1.65 million households with …
Poverty and the American Family: A Decade in Review
Because of dramatic levels of economic volatility and massive changes in welfare policies, scholars in this decade worried anew about whether our official poverty measure, adopted in the 1960s, is adequate. Poverty's causes continued to be debated, with demographic factors often pitted against policy and maternal employment changes. Some scholars focused on events that trigger spirals into poverty or poverty exits. The literature on consequences …
Surviving the Welfare System: How AFDC Recipients Make Ends Meet in Chicago
Much of the literature on the underclass alleges that welfare induces dependency. The author uses data from intensive interviews with 50 Chicago-area mothers on welfare to show that welfare pays too little to entice recipients into a life of passive dependence. The women interviewed all supplemented their AFDC and food stamp benefits with at least one of two sources of unreported income: assistance from family, friends, boyfriends, or absent fath…
Coming of Age in the Other America
The Role of Earned Income Tax Credit in the Budgets of Low-Income Households
The annual receipt of large tax refunds, primarily due to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), provides households with unusual opportunities to pay old bills and build assets. To examine these opportunities, the study surveys 194 black, Latino, and white parents who received EITC refunds of at least $1,000; in-depth interviews followed 6 months later. The majority of households (57 percent) report that they planned to allocate a considerable por…
The Social Safety Net After Welfare Reform: Recent Developments and Consequences for Household Dynamics
The remarkable transformation of the American social safety net that began in the early 1990s has led to seismic shifts in who benefits and how. More than two decades later, how should these changes be judged? Expanding and updating prior influential reviews, we evaluate how the transformation of the safety net-broadly defined-has shaped economic and family dynamics within low-income households. Collectively, social safety net policies have expan…
Unstable Work, Unstable Income: Implications for Family Well-Being in the Era of Time-Limited Welfare
Four years into the implementation of the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation, promising to “change welfare as we know it,” a critical question remains unanswered: How are formerly welfare-reliant families faring as they make the transition to work? Drawing on longitudinal, ethnographic data collected under the auspices of Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation's Project on Devolution and Urban Change, we examine changes in women's emplo…
Why Do Poor Men Have Children? Fertility Intentions among Low-Income Unmarried U.S. Fathers
Over the past several decades, nonmarital childbearing rates have risen sharply, especially among socioeconomically disadvantaged groups. Recent research suggests that disadvantaged Americans may defer or delay marriage in part because of perceived economic barriers. Yet, childbearing is also costly. Few studies have examined low-income parents' motivations for having children in a context of socioeconomic disadvantage. This study deploys qualita…
Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work
The Family-Go-Round: Family Complexity and Father Involvement from a Father’s Perspective
Men who have children with several partners are often assumed to be "deadbeats" who eschew their responsibilities to their children. Using data from the nationally representative National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort (NLSY-97), we show that most men in complex families intensively parent the children of one mother while being less involved, or not involved at all, with children by others. Repeated qualitative interviews with 110 low-i…
A Universal Child Allowance: A Plan to Reduce Poverty and Income Instability Among Children in the United States
To reduce child poverty and income instability, and eliminate extreme poverty among families with children in the United States, we propose converting the Child Tax Credit and child tax exemption into a universal, monthly child allowance. Our proposal is based on principles we argue should undergird the design of such policies: universality, accessibility, adequate payment levels, and more generous support for young children. Whether benefits sho…
The Compositional and Institutional Sources of Union Dissolution for Married and Unmarried Parents in the United States
Unmarried parents have less stable unions than married parents, but there is considerable debate over the sources of this instability. Unmarried parents may be more likely than married parents to end their unions because of compositional differences, such as more disadvantaged personal and relationship characteristics, or because they lack the normative and institutional supports of marriage, thus rendering their relationships more sensitive to d…
Single mothers and child support: The possibilities and limits of child support policy
Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage
Millie Acevedo bore her first child before the age of 16 and dropped out of high school to care for her newborn. Now 27, she is the unmarried mother of three and is raising her kids in one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods. Would she and her children be better off if she had waited to have them and had married their father first? Why do so many poor American youth like Millie continue to have children before they can afford to take care of …
How Much In-Kind Support Do Low-Income Nonresident Fathers Provide? A Mixed-Method Analysis
Past child support research has largely focused on cash payments made through the courts (formal support) or given directly to the mother (informal support) almost to the exclusion of a third type: non-cash goods (in-kind support). Drawing on repeated, semistructured interviews with nearly 400 low-income noncustodial fathers, the authors found that in-kind support constitutes about one quarter of total support. Children in receipt of some in-kind…
Taking Care of Mine: Can Child Support Become a Family‐Building Institution
U.S. children are more likely to live apart from a biological parent than at any time in history. Although the Child Support Enforcement system has tremendous reach, its policies have not kept pace with significant economic, demographic, and cultural changes. Narrative analysis of in-depth interviews with 429 low-income noncustodial fathers suggests that the system faces a crisis of legitimacy. Visualization of language used to describe all forms…
It's Not Like I'm Poor: How Working Families Make Ends Meet in a Post-Welfare World
The world of welfare has changed radically. As the poor trade welfare checks for low-wage jobs, their low earnings qualify them for a hefty check come tax time—a combination of the earned income tax credit and other refunds. For many working parents this one check is like hitting the lottery, offering several months’ wages as well as the hope of investing in a better future. Drawing on interviews with 115 families, the authors look at how parents…
Surviving the Welfare System: How AFDC Recipients Make Ends Meet in Chicago
Much of the literature on the underclass alleges that welfare induces dependency. The author uses data from intensive interviews with 50 Chicago-area mothers on welfare to show that welfare pays too little to entice recipients into a life of passive dependence. The women interviewed all supplemented their AFDC and food stamp benefits with at least one of two sources of unreported income: assistance from family, friends, boyfriends, or absent fath…
Black Families at the Crossroads: Challenges and Prospects
Single mothers and child support: The possibilities and limits of child support policy
The Politics of Pregnancy: Adolescent Sexuality and Public Policy
Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work
Work, Welfare, and Single Mothers' Economic Survival Strategies
Past efforts to conceptualize the effects of welfare on work have failed to consider the full range of incentives and disincentives that low-skill single mothers perceive and act upon when making the choice between welfare and work. They also have neglected the fundamental economic reality of these mothers' lives-neither welfare nor low-wage work gives single mothers enough income to meet their families'expenses. In-depth interviews with 379 low-…
The New Uprooted: Single Mothers in Urban Life
But for the Grace of Birth, There Go I
Looking to the Future: Welfare‐Reliant Women Talk About Their Job Aspirations in the Context of Welfare Reform
We examine the job aspirations of 80 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients in Cleveland and Philadelphia by drawing on data from in‐depth, qualitative interviews conducted in 1997–98, well after the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act was implemented but before time limits were reached. We show that these recipients view the work mandates they face as legitimate and express optimism regarding future…
What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say about Marriage
A primary goal of the landmark 1996 welfare reform legislation is to increase marriage rates among unskilled women with children. Current theories of marriage under-predict the extent of non-marriage, have not been adequately tested, or do not apply well to women with low-socioeconomic status. Furthermore, scholarly work on marriage attitudes among low-SES women suffers from a lack of up-to-date qualitative work. This study draws on qualitative i…
Unstable Work, Unstable Income: Implications for Family Well-Being in the Era of Time-Limited Welfare
Four years into the implementation of the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation, promising to “change welfare as we know it,” a critical question remains unanswered: How are formerly welfare-reliant families faring as they make the transition to work? Drawing on longitudinal, ethnographic data collected under the auspices of Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation's Project on Devolution and Urban Change, we examine changes in women's emplo…
A peek inside the black box: What marriage means for poor unmarried parents
Why Don't They Just Get Married? Barriers to Marriage among the Disadvantaged
Kathryn Edin and Joanna Reed review recent research on social and economic barriers to marriage among the poor and discuss the efficacy of efforts by federal and state policymakers to promote marriage among poor unmarried couples, especially those with children, in light of these findings.
Special Reviewers
High Hopes but Even Higher Expectations: The Retreat From Marriage Among Low-Income Couples
This study examines why low-income, unmarried parents who say that they plan to marry at the time their child is born do not follow through on their plans. We use data from a nationally representative birth cohort survey-the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N =3,710)-combined with data from an embedded qualitative study-Time, Love, Cash, Caring, and Children (n =47)-to explore the reasons behind this apparent discrepancy. We find that …
Why Do Poor Men Have Children? Fertility Intentions among Low-Income Unmarried U.S. Fathers
Over the past several decades, nonmarital childbearing rates have risen sharply, especially among socioeconomically disadvantaged groups. Recent research suggests that disadvantaged Americans may defer or delay marriage in part because of perceived economic barriers. Yet, childbearing is also costly. Few studies have examined low-income parents' motivations for having children in a context of socioeconomic disadvantage. This study deploys qualita…
Claiming Fatherhood: Race and the Dynamics of Paternal Involvement among Unmarried Men
In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the black family was nearing “complete breakdown” due to high rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing. In subsequent decades, nonmarital childbearing rose dramatically for all racial groups and unwed fathers were often portrayed as being absent from their children's lives. The authors examine contemporary nonmarital father involvement using quantitative evidence from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbei…
Poverty and the American Family: A Decade in Review
Because of dramatic levels of economic volatility and massive changes in welfare policies, scholars in this decade worried anew about whether our official poverty measure, adopted in the 1960s, is adequate. Poverty's causes continued to be debated, with demographic factors often pitted against policy and maternal employment changes. Some scholars focused on events that trigger spirals into poverty or poverty exits. The literature on consequences …
Parenting as a “package deal”: Relationships, fertility, and nonresident father involvement among unmarried parents
Fatherhood has traditionally been viewed as part of a “package deal” in which a father’s relationship with his child is contingent on his relationship with the mother. We evaluate the accuracy of this hypothesis in light of the high rates of multiple-partner fertility among unmarried parents using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a recent longitudinal survey ofnonmarital births in large cities. We examine whether unmarried mothers’…
The Relationship Contexts of Young Disadvantaged Men
Recent improvements in data collection offer unprecedented insight into the romantic partnerships of disadvantaged men, revealing higher levels of instability, complexity, and commitment than previously understood. Young disadvantaged men are often involved in casual romantic relationships that result in pregnancy. When this occurs, most men remain involved with the mother, are optimistic about the future of their relationships, and are committed…
Moving Teenagers Out of High-Risk Neighborhoods: How Girls Fare Better than Boys
Moving to Opportunity (MTO) offered public housing residents the opportunity to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. Several years later, boys in the experimental group fared no better on measures of risk behavior than their control group counterparts, whereas girls in the experimental group engaged in lower-risk behavior than control group girls. The authors explore these differences by analyzing data from in-depth interviews conducted with 86 tee…
The Role of Earned Income Tax Credit in the Budgets of Low-Income Households
The annual receipt of large tax refunds, primarily due to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), provides households with unusual opportunities to pay old bills and build assets. To examine these opportunities, the study surveys 194 black, Latino, and white parents who received EITC refunds of at least $1,000; in-depth interviews followed 6 months later. The majority of households (57 percent) report that they planned to allocate a considerable por…
After Moving to Opportunity: How Moving to a Low-poverty Neighborhood Improves Mental Health among African American Women
A large body of nonexperimental literature finds residing in a disadvantaged neighborhood is deleterious for mental health, and recent evidence from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program—a social experiment giving families living in high-poverty neighborhoods the opportunity to move to low-poverty neighborhoods—suggests a causal effect of moving to a low-poverty neighborhood on adult mental health. We use qualitative data from 67 Baltimore adul…
The Compositional and Institutional Sources of Union Dissolution for Married and Unmarried Parents in the United States
Unmarried parents have less stable unions than married parents, but there is considerable debate over the sources of this instability. Unmarried parents may be more likely than married parents to end their unions because of compositional differences, such as more disadvantaged personal and relationship characteristics, or because they lack the normative and institutional supports of marriage, thus rendering their relationships more sensitive to d…
Rising Extreme Poverty in the United States and the Response of Federal Means-Tested Transfer Programs
This study documents an increase in the prevalence of extreme poverty among US households with children between 1996 and 2011 and assesses the response of major federal means-tested transfer programs. Extreme poverty is defined using a World Bank metric of global poverty: $2 or less, per person, per day. Using the 1996–2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we estimate that in mid-2011, 1.65 million households with …
Psychology (32 works) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (31 works) · Economics (30 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Family Dynamics and Relationships (24 works) · Political science (22 works) · Demographic economics (21 works) · Developmental psychology (21 works) · Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving (17 works) · Social Psychology (17 works)