Surveys differ in the measurement of nonstandard work, such that some surveys require respondents to indicate whether they work either a standard or a nonstandard schedule, whereas others allow respondents to indicate that they work both types of schedules. We test whether these measurement decisions influence the estimated prevalence of maternal nonstandard work, using data from two sources: the Current Population Survey (N = 1,430) and the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 2,524). Using propensity score techniques, we find that giving respondents the option of reporting work at more than one type of schedule doubles the prevalence of nonstandard work, compared to allowing respondents to indicate only one type of schedule. Our results suggest that many mothers of young children regularly work at both standard and nonstandard times and that mutually exclusive conceptualizations of standard and nonstandard work schedules do not fully capture their experiences.

Do parents contribute to birth weight disparities in status attainment? This study uses a nationally representative sample of 8,550 children and 1,450 twins from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort to investigate whether, as recent studies have suggested, parents favor healthier children. Children with poor health are found to receive fewer parental investments, including breast-feeding and quality parent–child interaction, but results from between- and within-family regression models, using low birth weight as a proxy for child health, find no evidence that parents compensate for or reinforce child health endowments. Instead, birth-weight disparities in parental investment are linked with observable family, maternal, and child sociodemographic characteristics. Our results raise doubts about the utility of human capital models to explain health disparities in parental investment and shed new light on the broad spectrum of disadvantage faced by children with poor health.

In this article, we address how first and second marriages are formed by asking whether SES has similar effects on first and second marriage entry. Like many studies of first marriage, we focus on gender, socioeconomic characteristics (education, income, and employment status), and gender differences in the effect of SES. To examine this question, we use the NLSY79 (n = 12,231 never-married and 3,695 divorced persons), discrete-time logistic regression, and heterogeneous choice models to test for statistically significant differences by gender and between first and second marriages. Our models show gender differences in first and second marriage entry, that the effect of SES on marriage entry differs between first and second marriage, and that the interaction between gender and SES has a unique association with marital entry for never- and previously married individuals. Our results have implications for understanding marriage formation, stratification across the life course, and the well-being of divorced persons who remarry.

Drawing on social exchange theories, the authors hypothesized that educated women are more likely than uneducated women to leave violent marriages and suggested that this pattern offsets the negative education–divorce association commonly found in the United States. They tested these hypotheses using 2 waves of young adult data on 914 married women from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The evidence suggests that the negative relationship between women's education and divorce is weaker when marriages involve abuse than when they do not. The authors observed a similar pattern when they examined the association of women's proportional earnings and divorce, controlling for education. Supplementary analyses suggested that marital satisfaction explains some of the association among women's resources, victimization, and divorce but that marital violence continues to be a significant moderator of the education–divorce association. In sum, education appears to benefit women by both maintaining stable marriages and dissolving violent ones.

Research into intrahousehold finances challenges key assumptions about the family as a unitary whole, investigates the extent of sharing within it, examines mechanisms of control and allocation of resources, and reveals the personalized nature of different monies. This article presents an overview of research on within-household distribution (understood as both outcome and process). It discusses major questions addressed, including inequalities between (gendered) individuals and the potential reasons for these. It outlines significant developments and debates, within qualitative research in particular, in relation to the unit of analysis (traditionally, the married couple), the texture and meaning of financial dealings within couples, and the tensions between autonomy and equal sharing as values. It then discusses several key methodological challenges, and concludes by highlighting some policy implications of central research messages. Throughout, it draws on and discusses the other articles in this special section, which explore key methodological issues in researching within-household distribution.

This article presents a quantitative approach used to investigate differences in living standards between spouses within households. Adopting a specially adapted, standard poverty measurement approach—nonmonetary indicators—it explores differences between spouses in terms of possessions and access to certain goods and services and the control and management of household resources. Using data from a unique module in the Living in Ireland Survey (N = 2,248 individuals) as an exemplar, the article focuses on 3 methodological issues: (a) the development of specially designed nonmonetary indicators to explore differences in living standards within households rather than between households (including the role played by qualitative findings in developing those indicators and how focus groups were used to assess and validate the method), (b) the use of multivariate analysis to assess the impact of a wife's independent income in ameliorating differences in living standards between spouses, and (c) the deployment of a mechanism for use in quantitative surveys to record spousal presence and allow measurement of any subsequent difference in individual responses.

The authors examine how contributions to household resources, indicated by employment status, influence satisfaction with household income (SWHI) for members of male/female couples. They take changes in SWHI, which may differ within couples, to indicate changes in perceived benefits from their common household income, benefits that can go beyond individual consumption. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey for 2,396 couples from 1996 to 2007, three gender effects are identified. First, men predominate in making the type of contribution that most positively influences SWHI, namely, full-time employment. Second, the effect of contributions depends on the gender of the contributor, with men's employment being more influential than women's. Third, within couples, making the more influential contribution, as men tend to do, leads to relatively greater SWHI. The authors conclude that gender asymmetry in contributions made to household resources is one way in which gender inequalities invade and inhabit households.

Over the last 3 decades, economic models have been developed that recognize that potentially conflicting interests may shape household decisions and the sharing of resources within families. This article provides an overview of how decision making within households has been modeled within economics, presents the main benefits and limitations of those models, and critically assesses their usefulness to researchers from other disciplines interested in the within- household distribution of resources. The main focus is on the theory, empirical application, and results of the currently dominant collective models, but the authors also look at developments that led up to them and some subsequent extensions and alternative approaches. Given the weight placed by policymakers and others on economic and quantitative evidence, it is incumbent on researchers of all disciplines to understand the achievements and limitations of the models used, explicitly or implicitly, to produce such evidence and the assumptions that lie behind them.

This report presents some reflections on and experiences from a cross-national qualitative research project about within-household finances conducted by sociologists from Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. The authors focus first on the challenges of making qualitative cross-national comparisons and argue for the importance of establishing a common understanding of methodological and theoretical aspects. They then go on to consider the relevance of political – cultural context for understanding within-household distribution of resources. They suggest that meanings of money are influenced by understandings of gender, which in turn influence and are influenced by welfare regimes. They then present a few outcomes from a cross-national analysis of results from Spain, Sweden, and the United States. They conclude the article by suggesting that comparisons on the level of results rather than on the level of primary data is a viable option for qualitative cross-national analysis.

Child health is fundamental to well-being and achievement throughout the life course. Prior research has demonstrated strong associations between familial socioeconomic resources and children's health outcomes, with especially poor health outcomes among disadvantaged youth who experience a concentration of risks, yet little is known about the influence of maternal health as a dimension of risk for children. This research used nationally representative U.S. data from the National Health Interview Surveys in 2007 and 2008 (N = 7,361) to evaluate the joint implications of maternal health and socioeconomic disadvantage for youth. Analyses revealed that maternal health problems were present in a substantial minority of families, clustered meaningfully with other risk factors, and had serious implications for children's health. These findings support the development of health policies and interventions aimed at families.

Although there is substantial evidence linking marital quality to physical health, few studies have been longitudinal. This study examined data from the Marital Instability Over the Life Course Study; 1,681 married individuals followed for 20 years were included in these analyses. In order to control for life course effects, participants were divided into 2 cohorts: early life and midlife. On the basis of latent growth curve analysis, the results indicated that initial values of marital happiness and marital problems were significantly associated with the initial value of physical health among both cohorts. In addition, the slope of marital happiness was significantly associated with the slope of physical health among the younger cohort, and the slope of marital problems was significantly associated with the slope of physical health among the midlife cohort. These results provide evidence of the significant association between positive and negative dimensions of marital quality and physical health over the life course.

This study provides evidence that newlywed pairs who have a shared and well-grounded understanding of their courtship are better able to establish unions that endure. Using a sample of 168 couples, the authors found that marriages were more likely to survive when courting partners (a) loved each other to a similar degree, (b) depicted the probability of marriage and changes in the likelihood of marriage in a corresponding fashion over the course of their courtship, and (c) portrayed the courtship as escalating from a low (25%) to a high (75%) probability of marriage as spanning a comparable period of time. The durability of marriages was reflected, as well, in how solidly courting partners' feelings for each other were interwoven with their courtship experiences. More specifically, courtship difficulties were not as associated with weakened feelings of love or with heightened feelings of ambivalence among couples who later divorced as compared to those who stayed married.

This study examined the implications of postdivorce fathers' new unions and additional (step)children for two aspects of older fathers' relations with adult children born from a prior relationship: frequency of social contact and fathers' financial transfers. Data from multiple waves of the Health and Retirement Study (N = 13,017 observations on 4,997 adult children belonging to 1,917 ever-divorced fathers) were used to estimate multilevel models. The results indicated that divorced fathers who go on to form a new union have weaker relations with adult children from a prior union than their postdivorce counterparts who remain single. This finding partly reflects the detrimental effects of repartnered older fathers' new biological children and stepchildren. There is no difference between older remarried and cohabiting fathers' intergenerational ties. Moreover, fathers' additional biological children and stepchildren have similarly negative effects on fathers' relations with adult children from a previous union.

Drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study examined the impact of parental financial assistance on young adults' relationships with parents and well-being. Conditional change models were estimated to evaluate the effects of parental financial assistance reported in Wave 3 (ages 18–28) and Wave 4 (ages 24–34) of the study. The results (Ns ranged from 9,128 to 13,389 across outcomes) indicated that financial assistance was positively associated with changes in depressive symptoms and closeness to both mothers and fathers in both periods. Changes in self-esteem were less robustly linked to parental financial assistance. Although the observed pattern with respect to parent–child relations held regardless of the progress young people had made in the transition to adulthood, the effects for well-being, which were also relatively small in magnitude, did not. In particular, changes in depressive symptoms associated with financial assistance were concentrated among individuals occupying adult social roles.

Numerous studies comparing patients' end-of-life health care treatment preferences with their surrogates' reports of those preferences indicate that partners do not know one another's treatment preferences: Random guesses are just as likely as surrogate choices to match the patients' preferences. The present study uses the empathic accuracy model and the assumed similarity model to shed further light on accuracy and bias in surrogate reports. The data come from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research/Knowledge Networks Pilot Study 2010, a national sample of 1,075 heterosexual American couples age 18 to 64. Surrogate reports were simultaneously biased (i.e., correlated with the surrogate's own preference) and accurate (i.e., correlated with the partner's actual preference). Higher relationship quality and legal marriage (vs. cohabitation) were associated with increased assumed similarity bias. These findings suggest that practitioners working in end-of-life care need to be familiar with their partnered patients' relationship dynamics.

Guided by a risk and resilience framework, this study used a prospective longitudinal, multiple-reporter design to examine how social support from a mother figure during pregnancy interacted with Mexican-origin adolescent mothers' self-esteem to inform their parenting efficacy when their children were 10 months old. Using reports of perceived social support by adolescent mothers (M_age = 16.24, SD = 0.99) and their mother figures (M_age = 40.84, SD = 7.04) in 205 dyads, and controlling for demographic factors (i.e., adolescent age, adolescent nativity, family income, mothers' educational attainment, adolescent – mother coresidence) and adolescents' social support from a significant other, the findings indicated that social support during pregnancy was positively associated with adolescent mothers' future parenting efficacy when adolescent mothers had relatively lower self-esteem. The findings were consistent for adolescents' and mothers' reports and emphasize the value of social support from a mother figure among adolescent mothers with lower self-esteem. Implications for interventions are presented.

Although attachment theory posits that the use of nonmaternal care undermines quality of mothers' parenting, empirical evidence for this link is inconclusive. Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,233), the authors examined the associations between nonmaternal care characteristics and maternal sensitivity during the first 3 years of children's lives, with special attention to selection effects and moderation by resource levels. Findings from fixed-effects regression models suggested that, on average, there is little relationship between nonmaternal care characteristics and maternal sensitivity, once selection factors are held constant. Some evidence of moderation effects was found, however. Excellent-quality care is related to more sensitivity for mothers with lower family income. Poor-quality care is related to lower sensitivity for single mothers, but not partnered mothers. In sum, nonmaternal care characteristics do not seem to have as much influence on mothers' parenting as attachment theory claims.

This study investigated how core self-evaluations relate to work–family (and family–work) conflict and burnout. Drawing from a sample of 289 police officers and civilian staff who were either married or living in a union as common-law partners, this study advances an empirical integration of work–family and core self-evaluations research. The results suggested that even when work, nonwork, and demographic variables are controlled for, positive core self-evaluations (i.e., composite scale, self-esteem, locus of control, emotional stability) are related to less work–family (and family–work) conflict. The associations between core self-evaluations and burnout are partially mediated by work–family (and family–work) conflict. Finally, core self-evaluations moderated the association between work–family conflict and burnout, but not the one between family–work conflict and burnout.