Who Is in the Family? Family Membership Based on Parent and Child Household Matrices

Wendy D. Manning, Bowling Green State University
Kelly Balistreri, Bowling Green State University

The measurement of family living arrangements is important because it has implications for our understanding of the well-being of families and children. American families have undergone rapid transformation. As a consequence it is more challenging to capture their living arrangements. Social science measurement of family structure has not kept pace with the complexity of family life. Further, this complexity implies that children and parents may have different views of who belongs to their family. To provide a comprehensive assessment of family living arrangements we draw on a new, web-based data collection that includes complete household membership matrices from multiple family members (n=645 parent-child pairs). These findings will advance our understanding of family relationships and make possible assessments of family measurement strategies