Mission

• Supports research on key questions about the effects of family structure and processes on the health and well-being of children, adults, families, and communities as well as the influences of programs and policies on marriage;
• Builds research capacity with improved data and methods and brings together a multidisciplinary networks of scholars;
• Mentors and trains students and junior professionals, ensuring advancement in research on family structure; and
  
• Translates research to broad communities, e.g., researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.

Scientific Contributions

The National Center for Family & Marriage Research (NCFMR) provides scientific leadership, intellectual energy, and administrative assistance to support inter-disciplinary, policy-relevant research on U.S. families.

The NCFMR...

• Builds extensive data resources by providing pilot data collection, offering detailed information on family data and measures, and analyzing leading indicators of contemporary U.S. families.
• Facilitates research by sharing information about secondary data releases, upcoming conferences, and recent publications on families.
• Creates opportunities for sharing knowledge through seminars, training workshops, and conferences that are available to students and colleagues around the nation.
• Supports innovative research on families that yields important new substantive findings and furthers the development of new measures for subsequent data collections.
• Encourages collaborations and interactions across and within disciplines among researchers, policymakers, and practitioners.
  
• Disseminates research findings through a dedicated website, working papers, research briefs, conference proceedings, and electronic mailings, such as News and Notes, to policy and research communities and program practitioners.
  

All NCFMR-supported projects are rigorously reviewed and widely distributed to the broader community of scholars. Together, these investments lead to cutting-edge scholarship on family structure and well-being.

Research Focus

The NCFMR supports research efforts designed to investigate the links between family and wellbeing at all stages of the life course (e.g., childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood, and older adulthood). We emphasize both substantive and methodological complexities that need the attention of family scholars to formulate comprehensive, effective policy prescriptions, including: complex families; methodological and data advances; subpopulation variation (e.g., socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, nativity status, and residence); and links between academic research and policy.