# Intergenerational Influences on Family Formation Processes

> **NIH NIH P01** · UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR · 2020 · $195,869

## Abstract

Intergenerational Influences on Family Formation Processes
 This project will significantly advance the scientific understanding of key factors shaping family formation
processes---both marriage/cohabitation and fertility---in recent cohorts by (A) designing and assessing new
data that will create comparable family formation measures across the two primary data sources available for
tracking family change in the US, and (B) providing reliable empirical answers to two high-priority research
questions. The first question considers how the associations between parental SES and children's family
formation outcomes vary across cohorts and racial groups in response to key changes in economic conditions.
The second question asks the extent to which children's own early-life cognitive and socio-emotional abilities
determine their family formation outcomes in young adulthood. Answers to these questions will substantially
advance our understanding of change and variation in family formation and will also facilitate the design of
policies and programs to help Americans' achieve their family formation goals.
 The processes of family formation---the formation of sexual and co-residential relationships, marriage,
pregnancy, and childbearing---are among the most influential experiences of adult life, with wide-ranging
consequences for the health and wellbeing of families and children. The US National Survey of Family Growth
(NSFG) documents trends, but it does not provide the longitudinal design required to document long-term
associations from childhood to adulthood or across multiple generations. By contrast, because it features years
of repeated measures in many domains across the life courses of grandparents, parents, and their children,
the PSID and its Transition into Adulthood Supplement (TAS) are unparalleled resources for advancing family
formation research. We propose to significantly enhance the value of the TAS for the study of family formation
by revising the TAS measures to create direct comparability with NSFG, facilitating comparisons between the
nation's monitoring study and the nation's most valuable longitudinal study of multiple cohorts. The result will
be a tremendously valuable public good for family formation research, which will also allow us to answer the
scientific questions we propose to investigate.
 We will demonstrate the high scientific and policy significance of this advance with the two analyses we
propose, one creating innovative new insights into changes in intergenerational influences on family formation
process across cohorts and the other significantly advancing our understanding of the long-term consequences
of children's early-life skills and abilities on their early-adult family formation behaviors. Finally, by integrating
this project within the P01 proposal, we will coordinate analyses across projects and build key results from
Research Project 3 into the analyses for this project, significantly expanding the scope of b...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9938653
- **Project number:** 5P01HD087155-05
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR
- **Principal Investigator:** William G. Axinn
- **Activity code:** P01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $195,869
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** — → 2022-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9938653

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9938653, Intergenerational Influences on Family Formation Processes (5P01HD087155-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9938653. Licensed CC0.

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