The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) is a longitudinal birth cohort study of American families. Formerly known as the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, the study’s name was changed in January 2023.^[1]

Core aims of the study are to learn about the capabilities and relationships of unmarried parents and how children and parents in these families fare using various health, economic, and social measures over time.^[2] The FFCWS uses a stratified random sampling technique and oversampled non-marital births.^[3] Baseline data collection ran from 1998 to 2000, featuring interviews with both biological parents shortly after children's births as well as the collection of medical records.^[2] Follow-up interviews were conducted when the children were 1, 3, 5, 9, and 15 years old; as of the time of writing, 22-year interviews are currently being fielded.^[2] In addition to parent interviews, the follow-up waves included in-home assessments, child care or teacher questionnaires, and interviews with the child.^[2][4]

Most data for the FFCWS is available for free with the opportunity for users to access restricted contextual data through a contract data process.^[5] Some key findings of the study include that unmarried parents and their children face a host of social challenges and tend to have loving but ultimately unstable relationships.^[6][7] Additionally, most fathers are active in their children’s lives, contributing emotionally and materially.^[6][7] The FFCWS has also been utilized for reflections on data quality and survey methodologies. The study is run by Princeton University and Columbia University.

The FFCWS is a unique dataset providing a wealth of information on contemporary families. Originally designed to understand and provide data on children who were born to unmarried parents, the FFCWS acknowledged that these children were not born to single mothers but to families, though the parental bonds may have been fragile. While, in the 1990s, it was known that children living with single mothers after a divorce fared worse than children living in two-parent married households, until the FFCWS, little data was available about children born to unmarried parents – a rapidly growing demographic at the time.^[8] The FFCWS is a critical source of data on the wellbeing of children born to unmarried parents, parents’ relationships with each other, father involvement, and how parents’ roles have changed over time. The FFCWS aims to better understand the underlying causes of social problems associated with unmarried families and study the impact of policies on family formation and child development.^[6]

The FFCWS’s initial research questions focused on gathering information on four domains: (1) socioeconomic background of unmarried parents, especially fathers; (2) relationship patterns between unmarried parents; (3) life outcomes of children in these families; and (4) the impact of policies and environmental conditions on families and children. Some of the major topic areas covered are as follows.^[9]

• Household characteristics: roster of family members, family members' demographic information, child's living arrangements, employment and income, housing and neighborhood characteristics, religion
• Incarceration: current status and history of parents and new partners
• Family relationships: relationship between the biological parents, new partnerships, social support, church attendance, civic participation
• Parental health and cognitive ability: physical health, mental health, cognitive ability
• Parenting: nurturance, discipline, cognitive stimulation, relationship with child, Child Protective Services involvement^[10]
• Child health and development: child use of medical care, child health, child nutrition, daily routines, cognitive development, child behavior, child relationships
• Child care/kindergarten: child care use, child care provider characteristics
• Elementary school: school characteristics, classroom characteristics, teacher characteristics, child's behavior, special education services, comparative academic performance, parental involvement
• Genetic analysis: mother and child, genetic predisposition, gene-environment interaction
• Program participation: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, food stamps, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credit, child support enforcement, housing assistance^[10]

Nearly 1,300 peer-reviewed articles, books and book chapters, and dissertations or theses have been written using data from the FFCWS.20 Together with sociologists Ron Haskins and Elisabeth Donahue, Sara McLanahan, Garfinkel, and Mincy summarized in 2010 that the FFCWS had four major findings.^[6] Firstly, despite earlier conceptions, a large majority of unmarried parents had intimate and loving relationships when their children were born.^[2] Over 50% of the unwed couples surveyed in the baseline were living together, and another 36% were dating each other.^[6] Secondly, unmarried parents faced numerous challenges regarding career opportunities, family life, and child rearing. Unmarried mothers were on average six years younger than married mothers but were three times more likely to have had another child with another partner.^[6] The presence of multiple father figures inside and outside the family increased the likelihood of significant social tensions.^[6][18] In addition, unwed parents reported lower incomes, poorer health, and higher rates of substance abuse.^[6] Unmarried fathers were five times more likely to have a prison record, and incarceration was shown to have darkened employment prospects and disrupted family relations.^[19] Perhaps as a result, the FFCWS's third major finding suggested that despite initial closeness, families with unwed parents proved relatively unstable, with only 35% of the couples staying together when the child reached the age of 5.^[6][20] Finally, births to unmarried parents were associated with poorer test performance and increased behavioral problems for children.^[6][21]

In addition to these findings, researchers have used the data to examine the importance of fathers in young adults’ lives,^[19] childhood sleep,^[22] adolescent relationships,^[23] child protective service contact,^[24] exposure to deadly gun violence,^[25] eviction prevalence,^[26] and law enforcement exposure,^[27] among many other topics. A complete bibliography of publications using FFCWS is available at the FFCWS website.

The timing of the in-hospital baseline interview was conceptualized as a “magical moment” that allowed researchers to enroll people who would have been unable to participate under other circumstances.^[3] According to sociologist Kathleen Kiernan's review of large-scale studies on Western families, the FFCWS differs from most other studies starting between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s because of the project's diligence in tracking non-custodial parents, generally fathers living outside the household.^[28]

However, the project has several limitations. The research team excluded births in hospitals where less than 10% of the births were to unmarried parents. The researchers also excluded parents who planned to put their children up for adoption or who were below the age of 18 and were prohibited from giving interviews per hospital policy.^[3] Such exclusions create selection bias and render the sample less representative of the US population.^[3] Even within the selected sampling frame, non-response bias occurs.^[3] Many parents did not participate in the study because they could not complete the interviews in English or Spanish, and many fathers could not be contacted for interview.^[3] Finally, social desirability bias may cause respondents to underreport some measures such as substance abuse and domestic violence. Survey weights are available to address some of these concerns.^[5]

In 2017, a team of scholars led by sociologist Matthew J. Salganik organized a Fragile Families Challenge, which invited 160 teams from across the world to apply machine learning algorithms to data from Years 0 to 9 to predict six outcomes in Year 15.^[29] None made very accurate predictions. Salganik, along with a team of other researchers including Ian Lundberg, Kathryn Edin, Tim Nelson, and Susan Clampet-Lundquist subsequently conducted qualitative interviews with a subset of the FFCWS sample to try and understand the limits to these predictive models.^[11]

The FFCWS is a joint project of Princeton University and Columbia University and is funded by a consortium of private foundations and government agencies.^[30] At Princeton, the project is actively managed through the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing.^[31] Princeton's Institutional Review Board  oversees ethical considerations related to the study.^[11] At Columbia, this project is managed by the Columbia Population Research Center.^[14] The project was founded by Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan^[32] and Columbia sociologists Irwin Garfinkel^[33] and Ron Mincy.^[34] The current principal investigators of the project are sociologist Kathryn Edin from Princeton and social economist Jane Waldfogel from Columbia. Previous principal investigators include McLananhan,^[31] Garfinkel,^[31] and Mincy,^[31] plus Princeton economist and public health expert Christina Paxson^[35] and Columbia psychologist Jeanne Brooks-Gunn.^[31]

Data collection for Year 9,^[13] Year 15,^[14] and Year 22 of the FFCWS was predominantly administered by the research service provider Westat. The previous four waves of data collection were conducted by Mathematica Policy Research,^{[36][10][12][37]} and the first wave was also conducted by the National Opinion Research Center.^[36]

• Early Childhood Longitudinal Program
• Family structure in the United States
• Millennium Cohort Study
• National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health