The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study was designed to address four questions of great interest to researchers and policy makers:

1. What are the conditions and capabilities of unmarried parents, especially fathers?
2. What is the nature of the relationships between unmarried parents?
3. How do children born into these families fare?
4. How do policies and environmental conditions affect families and children?

While the Study was designed to follow the lives of children born to unmarried parents, the sample also includes a comparison sample of children born to married parents. Specifically, the Study follows a cohort of nearly 5,000 children born in the U.S. between 1998 and 2000 (roughly three-quarters of whom were born to unmarried parents). The cities were selected using a stratified random sample of all U.S. cities with 200,000 or more. Cities were grouped according to their policy environments and labor market conditions in order to ensure diversity in policy environments. See the sample design paper for details on the sample design.

The core Study consists of interviews with both mothers and fathers at the child’s birth and again when children are ages one, three, and five. The parent interviews collect information on attitudes, relationships, parenting behavior, demographic characteristics, health (mental and physical), economic and employment status, neighborhood characteristics, and program participation. See the questionnaires or the questionnaire map for more details on the topics covered in the interviews. Many measures overlap with those used in other large-scale studies such as the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP), Early Head Start, the Teenage Parent Demonstration, and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort 2000 (ECLS-B). See the scales documentation for more details on established measures.

We received funding from NICHD to conduct a nine-year follow-up, which incorporates the core, in-home, and teacher studies. We began interviewing for the nine-year follow-up in the summer of 2007 and be in the field through the end of 2009.

Data from the baseline, one-year, and three-year follow-ups are available to the public at the Princeton University Office of Population Research (OPR) data archive. Study questionnaires, documentation, data alerts, and responses to frequently asked questions (FAQs) are available here. For a timeline for future public use file expected release dates, click here.

In order to protect the confidentiality of survey respondents, geographic identifiers and medical records data are not released on the public use data files. Researchers can apply for these data via a restricted use contract.

See also information about the collaborative studies.