[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] 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.
These cities all had populations above 200,000 and were selected for diversity in child support enforcement, labor market conditions, and welfare generosity.
[2] The use of an oversample of unmarried couples made survey participants disproportionately low-income and thus especially relevant for studying various social disadvantages.
The primary caregiver was usually the mother, but it could also be the father or someone else who spent the most time with custody over the child in a family setting, like a grandparent.
[13] All families with home visits were then asked for contact information for the child's elementary school teacher, who was mailed a survey.
[6] Firstly, despite earlier conceptions, a large majority of unmarried parents had intimate and loving relationships when their children were born.
[6] Secondly, unmarried parents faced numerous challenges regarding career opportunities, family life, and child rearing.
[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][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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.