The first four waves of the Fragile Families Study include data from the core study, which includes telephone interviews with mothers and fathers, and a number of collaborative studies which were conducted over the telephone, in-person, or via fieldwork (see figure below). Some of the collaborative studies added questions to the core interviews, others will yield separate data files for subsets of the core sample.

The core study began with mothers interviewed in the hospital soon after the child’s birth. Most fathers were also interviewed in the hospital. These initial interviews are followed by telephone interviews with both parents when the child is one, three, and five years old. The core interviews are about an hour in length, and collect extensive information on socio-demographic characteristics, parents’ health, parental relationships, parenting, and child wellbeing. Data from the first three waves of the core study are available to the public.

There are three collaborative studies that will yield public use data files for subsets of the core sample. The first is the In-Home Longitudinal Study of Pre-School Aged Children which includes a primary caregiver survey and in-home assessments. At ages three and five, the child’s primary caregiver (typically the child’s mother, unless the child lives with the father or a non-parental caretaker) participates in an additional in-depth interview of about an hour that focuses on parenting, child health, and development. This interview, usually conducted in the child’s home, is accompanied by a set of direct assessments of parenting, child health, and development. These assessments take an additional hour to complete. The three-year In-Home Data are now available to the public. Five-year data are forthcoming in the Fall of 2008.

The second collaborative study is the Child Care and Parental Employment Study, which contributed questions on child care/early education and maternal employment to the core and primary caretaker surveys and conducts child care provider surveys and direct assessments of child care quality at the three-year follow-up and kindergarten surveys at the five-year follow-up in ten of the Fragile Families Cities. We hope to make three-year data available to the public in the near future.

The third collaborative study is Fragile Families and Child Health, which extracted medical records that contain information on the mother’s pregnancy and delivery and the child’s health at birth. The medical records data are available via a restricted use contract.

There are a number of other collaborative studies that added incarceration histories, marital, cohabitation, and fertility histories, and questions about religious beliefs and practices to the core survey. There are also two qualitative studies (Couple Dynamics & Fathers' Investments in Children: A Qualitative Addition and the Fathers' Ties to Unmarried Mothers and Their Children Study) which conduct in-depth interviews of sub-samples of Fragile Families respondents. TLC3 data are being made available to the public via ICPSR sometime in 2008.

We recently 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.

For more information on the core study, go to Core Design. For more information on the above collaborative studies or the collaborative studies that added questions to the core interview, go to Collaborative Studies.