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The current study examines the impact of maternal cohabitation and remarriage on children's father/father-figure relationships, using longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 Child cohort. Data will be taken from the 1998 survey year. Children of never-married, divorced, and separated mothers are included. Dependent variables differ by child's age, with greater use of child-report data for older children. The relationships between children and fathers under age ten will be assessed by mother report of child-father closeness and child involvement with father-figures. For children ages ten to fourteen, measures of father involvement, time with father, father closeness, stepfather involvement, time with stepfather, and stepfather closeness will be constructed directly from child reports. For children ages fifteen and up, dependent variables will be child reports of frequency of visitation and phone conversations with the nonresident father. The payment of child support will be examined for children of all ages using maternal reports. It is hypothesized that maternal cohabitation is associated with child relationships with the biological father both directly, and through a spurious selection effect. There is some evidence that nonresident fathers feel displaced when another potential father-figure enters the child's life. This effect is not expected, however, to be as strong for maternal cohabitation as it will be for maternal remarriage, as the child's relationship with the new father-figure is more tenuous in cohabitations than remarriages. Selection effects are also expected to be very different between maternal cohabitation and maternal remarriage. Cohabiting mothers are expected to be of a lower socioeconomic status on average than remarried mothers, and previous evidence indicates that maternal education is positively associated with father-child contact in disrupted families. Mother SES is also likely to be correlated with father SES, and father SES is also positively associated with father-child contact and payment of child support. In part because of the socioeconomic effect, it is also expected that children of never-married parents will be more heavily represented in cohabiting than in remarried households, and fathers are less likely to see and contribute to children if the children were not born in marriage....The study uses ordinary least-squares and logistic regression to examine these hypotheses, with special attention paid to separating spurious effects based on selection from direct effects caused by maternal marital/cohabitation status.