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Title: Family Structure and Children's Educational Outcomes: Blended Families, Stylized Facts, and Descriptive Regressions
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Ginther, Donna K. Pollak, Robert A. |
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Family Structure and Children's Educational Outcomes: Blended Families, Stylized Facts, and Descriptive Regressions Working Paper, Population Research Center, NORC & the University of Chicago, March 2004. Also: http://www.spc.uchicago.edu/prc/pdfs/ginthe02.pdf Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: National Opinion Research Center - NORC Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Family Structure; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Siblings This paper is a revised and retitled version of "Does Family Structure Affect Children's Educational Outcomes?" This paper adds to the growing literature describing correlations between children's educational outcomes and family structure. Although popular discussions focus on the distinction between twoparent families and single-parent families, McLanahan and Sandefur [1994] show that outcomes for stepchildren are similar to outcomes for children in single-parent families. McLanahan and Sandefur describe their results as showing that the crucial distinction is between children who were reared by both biological parents and children who were not. This description is misleading. This paper shows that educational outcomes for both types of children in blended families -- stepchildren and their half-siblings who are the joint biological children of both parents -- are similar to each other and substantially worse than outcomes for children reared in traditional nuclear families. We conclude that, as a description of the data, the crucial distinction is between children reared in traditional nuclear families (i.e., families in which all children are the joint biological children of both parents) and children reared in other family structures (e.g., single-parent families or blended families). We then turn from "stylized facts" (i.e., simple correlations) which control only for family structure to "descriptive regressions" which control for other variables such as family income. When controls for other variables are introduced, the relationship between family structure and children's educational outcomes weakens substantially and is often statistically insignificant. In the conclusion we clarify the question, "What is the effect of family structure on outcomes for children?" Interpreted literally, the question asks about the effect of one endogenous variable on another. We argue for reformulating the family structure question by specifying some explicit counterfactual, and express a preference for a policy-relevant counterfactual. |
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Bibliography Citation
Ginther, Donna K. and Robert A. Pollak. "Family Structure and Children's Educational Outcomes: Blended Families, Stylized Facts, and Descriptive Regressions." Working Paper, Population Research Center, NORC & the University of Chicago, March 2004. |