Causes of Inequality in Children’s Health and Economics: Family Structure versus Family Process

The aim of this project is to examine the degree to which changes in family process versus changes in family structure explain life course inequality in health and economics.

More specifically, the researchers investigate the following:

1. the bidirectional influences between couple relationship quality and family health/economics over time
2. the causal effects of couple relationship quality on health and family economics
3. the relative contribution of parental relationship quality versus parental divorce in explaining inequalities in child health and economics
4. the heterogeneity of these effects across families with different social statuses

This will be examined by linking data on family process from five different randomized controlled trials of couple-focused intervention with register-based data on divorce, health and economic outcomes.