No abstract

We examine the life course transitions into and from families headed by unmarried cohabiting couples for a recent cohort of American children. Life table estimates, based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth mother-child files, indicate about one in four children will live in a family headed by a cohabiting couple sometime during childhood. Economic uncertainty is an important factor determining whether children in single-parent families subsequently share a residence with a mother's unmarried partner. Moreover, virtually all children in cohabiting-couple families will experience rapid subsequent changes in family status. Our estimates provide a point of departure for future work on children's exposure to parental cohabitation and its social and economic implications.

Marriage promotion policies should focus on lowering rates of nonmarital childbearing. Reductions in nonmarital childbearing, however, may not eliminate long-standing discrepancies in marriage rates between black and white women.

This study assesses the stability of Americans' health insurance status over a four-year period. Relatively few Americans were continuously uninsured for the four years 1996 to 1999, but a sizable number of the uninsured lacked a stable source of coverage. At least as many people were repeatedly uninsured as experienced a single gap in otherwise stable coverage. Given these dynamics, policymakers should think of "uninsured" as referring not to people, but rather to gaps in coverage over time. Reforms that stop short of universal coverage should be evaluated in terms of their likely effects on the continuity and stability of coverage.

Our objectives are to describe the policies adopted after PRWORA, which vary across states, to test for common underlying policy concepts, demonstrating how these policies are interrelated, and to examine whether policy stringency diffused to neighboring states results in greater policy stringency across all states over time. We convert textual TANF welfare guidelines into empirically derived policy dimensions and use the derived quantitative scores to describe variation and change in welfare policy dimensions across status during the 1996-2003 post-welfare-reform period. Copyright (c) 2006 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.