by Jordan Wingate
This article originally appeared in the School of Social Work 2023 Fall Impact Report.
Today, U.S. policy and federal programming broadly incentivizes the traditional “nuclear family”: two married parents with children living in one household. Yet this family structure is becoming less common nationwide, and growing research is showing that children and individuals can thrive in many different family environments.
The question we should be asking, said Todd Jensen (Ph.D., MSW), research assistant professor in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work, is “How can policy and programs be modified to uplift families where they actually are, rather than trying to move families toward a single type of family structure?”
Jensen is leading an interview-based study of parents’ and caregivers’ strengths, challenges, transitions, and stages in their experiences raising children from birth through their 18th birthday. Findings are poised to bring new detail to traditional models of families’ compositions and needs throughout the life course.
This pilot study is one part of the multistate Life Course Intervention Research Network (LCIRN), an interdisciplinary initiative established with a five-year $1.2 million grant from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau to enhance the nation’s programs and services that support children and families across their lives.
As part of LCIRN, Jensen’s study is focused on high-level questions about the definition of “family,” common family experiences, and stages or events when interventions may be especially potent. Jensen’s team is answering these questions by looking at the various family environments and contexts in which children are being raised. That requires talking to parents and guardians themselves.
“Our use of in-depth interviews is enabling caregivers to share their rich and complex family stories, one chapter at a time,” said Jensen.
Through an initial pool of 17 in-depth interviews, Jensen is providing needed evidence against which traditional theories, such as the family life cycle and family development theory, can continue to be reexamined – a process called “ground truthing.” That is, do data from individual families conform to grand theoretical frameworks, or highlight their limited ability to capture diverse families’ experiences?
Preliminary findings are already highlighting important family environmental factors (e.g., unexpected transitions to parenthood) with reverberating impacts on families, providing valuable data for family interventionists seeking to promote positive long-term outcomes.
For Jensen, who plans to build on these findings via a larger-scale investigation, bringing fresh nuance to family environments is high-stakes work. Not only will data from his study be useful for interventions proposed by the larger network, it can also help interventionists nationwide better support children by showing them what kinds of support produce the greatest impact across diverse families.“This study is asking researchers and interventionists to truly embrace the complexity of family life,” said Jensen.
As a family research and engagement specialist in the School of Social Work’s Jordan Institute for Families and co-founder and co-chair of the Diverse Family Structures Focus Group of the National Council on Family Relations, Jensen wants to create support that can strengthen families with different needs in different contexts. His line of research is foregrounding the diversity of U.S. families in ways that will support interventionists, policymakers, and ultimately, families themselves.
THE BIG PICTURE
- Pilot study launched as part of $1.2M multistate grant from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau
- One of LCIRN’s nine investigations focused on enhancing the nation’s programs and services that support children and families
- 17 qualitative in-depth interviews conducted to provide an empirical basis for testing broader theoretical constructs
