Abstract
There is an accumulating body of evidence suggesting that being raised in a non-intact family may adversely affect child outcomes across a number of developmental domains. Given the dynamic nature of family life for some children today, changes in family structure may need to be captured in a more comprehensive manner. The scientific question is how capturing dynamics of family structure can be achieved. The sample comprised individuals aged 11-14 in cycle five of the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. We examined different approaches to conceptualizing and modeling the effect of the family structure effect: current family structure; previous family structures; trajectories of family structure; and change in family structure on externalizing and internalizing behavior in pre-adolescence. Main methodological findings included confounding of the current family structure effect by previous experience, collinearity among family structure main effects, and low analytic power for trajectories. We also considered the timevarying nature of family income and employment status of the primary household respondent using inverse probability weighting to estimate the causal parameters of a marginal structural model. In one of our most sophisticated conceptualizations of family structure effects, we found that recent change in family structure had a statistically significant effect on the odds of externalizing behavior: Odds Ratio (95% Confidence Interval) = 2.95 (1.73-5.02). Overall, our substantive findings were tempered by methodological caveats, which have important implications for future studies in the area and for broader issues related to data collection, study design, and analysis.
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McDonald, S., Moodie, E. & Lynch, J. 1210 Methodological Approaches to Conceptualizing and Modeling the Effect of Dynamic Family Structure on Child Behavior. Pediatr Res 68 (Suppl 1), 599–600 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-201011001-01210
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-201011001-01210