The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study
and Fragile Families Challenge
The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study
The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study changed its name to The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) in January 2023. Note that some contents may contain the study's former name. Any further references to FFCWS should kindly observe this name change.
The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) follows a cohort of nearly 5,000 children born in the U.S. between 1998 and 2000. The study oversampled births to unmarried couples; and, when weighted, the data are representative of births in large U.S. cities at the turn of the century.
The FFCWS was originally designed to address four questions of great interest to researchers and policy makers: (1) What are the conditions and capabilities of unmarried parents, especially fathers?; (2) What is the nature of the relationships between unmarried parents?; (3) How do children born into these families fare?; and (4) How do policies and environmental conditions affect families and children?
The FFCWS consists of interviews with mothers, fathers, and/or primary caregivers (PCG) at birth and again when children are ages one, three, five, nine, fifteen, and twenty-two. The parent/PCG interviews collected information on attitudes, relationships, parenting behavior, demographic characteristics, health (mental and physical), economic and employment status, neighborhood characteristics, program participation, and more. At ages nine, fifteen, and twenty-two the focal children were interviewed directly. The direct child interviews (Year 9 and 15) collected data on family relationships, home routines, schools, peers, and physical and mental health, as well as health behaviors. At age twenty-two, the Young Adult (YA) survey with the original focal child included topics related to socioeconomic status, family formation, fertility history, health, cognitive and non-cognitive skills, social support, access to government programs, systems involvement, impacts of COVID-19, and more.
A collaborative study of the FFCWS, the In-Home Longitudinal Study of Pre-School Aged Children (In-Home Study) collected data from a subset of the FFCWS Core respondents at the Year 3 and 5 follow-ups to ask how parental resources in the form of parental presence or absence, time, and money influence children under the age of five. The In-Home Study collected information on a variety of domains of the child's environment, including: the physical environment (quality of housing, nutrition and food security, health care, adequacy of clothing and supervision) and parenting (parental discipline, parental attachment, and cognitive stimulation). In addition, the In-Home Study also collected information on several important child outcomes, including anthropometrics, child behaviors, and cognitive ability. This information was collected through: interviews with the child's primary caregiver, and direct observation of the child's home environment and the child's interactions with his or her caregiver. Similar activities were conducted during the Year 9 follow-up. At the Year 15 follow-up, a condensed set of home visit activities were conducted with a subsample of approximately 1,000 teens. Teens who participated in the In-Home Study were also invited to participate in a Sleep Study and were asked to wear an accelerometer on their non-dominant wrist for seven consecutive days to track their sleep, in addition to the completion of daily diary entries.
At Year 3, 5, and 9, a collaborative study collected data from the child care provider (Year 3) and teacher (Years 5 and 9) through mail-based surveys. Additionally, a sample of teens participating in the Year-15-in-home study completed the mDiary Study of Adolescent Relationships (mDiary), a year-long study examining the romantic and sexual relationships of teens. At Year 22, data includes a collaborative study data evaluating whether COVID-19 impacted participant's mental health and social support systems from a sub-sample of eligible FFCWS families.
Note: Due to the collaborative nature of the FFCWS, we invite data users to submit any feedback or issues found in the seventh wave of data using the FFCWS Year 22 Data Feedback Form .
Documentation for these files is available on the FFCWS website located at https://ffcws.princeton.edu/documentation. See below for more information about documentation.
For details of updates made to the FFCWS data files, please see https://ffcws.princeton.edu/alerts
Data collection for the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers R01HD36916, R01HD39135, and R01HD40421, as well as a consortium of private foundations.
The Fragile Families Challenge
In 2017, a team of researchers affiliated with Princeton University hosted a scientific mass collaboration, which used predictive modeling techniques to predict a set of six outcome variables at children's fifteenth birthdays based on data from the first five waves of the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Participants were provided with a special merged version of the study data to be used to develop their models during the collaboration. These Fragile Families Challenge files contain their own unique identifier for each family in the study, and were constructed specifically for use during this project. These files should be downloaded in order to extend or replicate the work from the Fragile Families Challenge, but should not be merged with the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study data files for new analyses.
The Fragile Families Challenge was supported by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation.
FFCWS Documentation
Please visit the FFCWS website to download the documentation and find out more about study and data files including:
- Public Data User Guides for each wave
- Questionnaires for all waves
- Sample design paper and weighting documentation
- Sleep Actigraphy Data documentation
- Metadata Explorer
- Data alerts and frequently asked questions (FAQ)
- Review publications and working papers using the FFCWS data
- Latest FFCWS News (data workshops, recent publications, press)
For those researchers specifically interested in extending and replicating work in the Fragile Families Challenge, the Fragile Families Challenge blog also provides additional information.
Contact Us
If you have any questions about the FFCWS or problems obtaining or using the data, please email us at ffdata@princeton.edu.
Registration Required
To access these datasets, please login or register as a user of the data archive.
