Major award enables professor to embark on groundbreaking study of children

Dr. Susan Brown, an assistant professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University, will spend the next five years immersed in research to find out, backed by a prestigious Mentored Research Scientist Development Award from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

The award, which amounts to nearly $540,000 through June 2008, will enable the demographer to become an interdisciplinary investigator by learning more about child and adolescent development and expanding on her prior study of cohabitation. It's a prestigious award because junior faculty don't commonly receive such extensive research funding, according to Dr. Lynne Casper, health scientist administrator and demographer at NICHD. "It's very unusual to have five years of research support for someone at her (career) stage," Casper says.

Brown's previous study of cohabitation has focused on adult well-being, but she argues that its effects on children should be addressed as well. While similar studies have been done on children of divorce and stepfamilies, "we know very little about the well-being of children in cohabiting unions," she notes. Some children have complex living arrangements that "we're only beginning to try to disentangle," says Brown, who has taught at BGSU since 1998.

While one kind of cohabiting family may simply include children and their unmarried biological parents, another is a cohabiting stepfamily-a biological parent and child living with the parent's partner. Many of the growing number of single-parent families include an unmarried partner, adds Brown, who holds a Ph.D. in sociology and demography from Pennsylvania State University. "

There's cause to be concerned" about the children, she says, based on the limited research that has been done, some of it by Dr. Wendy Manning, an associate professor of sociology at BGSU. Manning and Dr. Ann Crouter, a developmental psychologist from Penn State, are Brown's mentors on the project.

Earlier research has turned up well-documented risk factors, including indications that cohabiting families tend to be less stable than married-couple families and the children are more economically disadvantaged, Brown says.

Her own previous study, funded with a $20,000 grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, found that children in cohabiting families-particularly adolescents-don't do as well as peers in married-couple families. That study looked at behavioral and emotional problems, as well as school engagement.

Sometimes, people don't see much difference in the well-being of children in married vs. cohabiting unions, but existing research hasn't found children of cohabitation doing better than their counterparts, according to Brown. That's not to say, however, that children are "doomed" if they're not living in a married-couple household, she adds. In the new study, Brown will draw from two large sources of national data-the 1992-2002 Survey of Program Dynamics and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Several hundred of the children in the data sets are in cohabiting families. Brown will attempt to identify mechanisms that underlie the differences among children, such as parenting differences, family instability and economic factors.

The award is a credit to Brown's potential "to make a mark in the field" and to BGSU for providing a setting where she can grow, according to Manning, who directs the Center for Family and Demographic Research at the University. Brown is among faculty affiliated with the center, which analyzes social and demographic information on child, adolescent and family issues.

(Posted July 03, 2003 )