The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study
and The In-Home Longitudinal Study of Pre-School Aged Children
Data Alerts
November 1, 2011 Data from the Nine-Year wave of data
collection are now available to the public. The data file contains
data from the core biological mother and father, primary caregiver,
child, and teacher interviews, as well as measures from the Home Visit,
including cognitive tests, height/weight, primary caregiver
self-administered questionnaire, and in-home observations.
May 26, 2011 The Three-Year In-Home Survey public
use data release now includes the Toddler Attachment Q-SORT data.
March 21, 2011 One change has been made to the
Five-Year In-home data since its initial release (January 2009):
the anthropometric variable, cbmi_z, has been revised. The variable
cbmi_z included in the 2009 data release contains the child’s BMI
standardized score (Z-score) based on the BMI values calculated
using the height and weight of children who participated in the In-home
survey, regardless of age and gender. The updated cbmi_z, generated
from the CDC Growth Charts program, is the child’s BMI-for-age
standardized score, which can be used to compare one child’s BMI to
the median BMI value of children in the reference population of the
same age (in months) and gender.
May 26, 2010 Three-Year Child Care Provider and
Five-Year Teacher Survey data are available for download as standalone
files.
March 31, 2009 Updated data files for both Three-year
and Five-year In-home Longitudinal Study of Pre-School Aged Children survey
have been rereleased and are available from the OPR data archive. This
release includes one main change to these data sets: the ID of the father
(fathid3 or fathid4 in the Three-year and Five-year data, respectively) is
now available for every respondent who completed a wave of the In-home survey,
regardless of the participation of the father in the corresponding wave of
the core father survey. Other changes include minor corrections to the labels
of a few variables.
February 4, 2009 Five-Year in-home data are released
and available for download from the OPR data archive.
The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study
The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study follows a cohort
of nearly 5,000 children born in the U.S. between 1998 and 2000.
The study over samples 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 Study was 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 Study consists of interviews with both mothers and fathers
at birth and again when children are ages one, three and five.
The parent interviews collect information on attitudes, relationships,
parenting behavior, demographic characteristics, health (mental
and physical), economic and employment status, neighborhood
characteristics, and program participation.
Baseline, one-year, three-year, five-year, and nine-year follow up data
from the Core Study are available to the public. Upon
registration,
users can download data files from the first five waves of the
core study. For the first four waves, mother and father data are
provided in separate data files, as well as a merged file with
the baseline through year five waves. The nine-year wave combines
mother, father, primary caregiver, child, and teacher interviews,
as well as measures from the Home Visit, including cognitive tests,
height/weight, primary caregiver self-administered questionnaire,
and in-home observations, into one combined file.
Each file contains records for all 4,898 births regardless of
whether the respondent was interviewed in a given wave. Sample
flags on each file indicate which cases were interviewed at each wave.
Documentation
is available on the Fragile Families web site located at
www.fragilefamilies.princeton.edu/documentation.asp.
The In-Home Longitudinal Study of Pre-School Aged Children
The In-Home Longitudinal Study of Pre-School Aged Children collects
data from a subset of the Fragile Families Core respondents at the
three- and five-year 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 collects 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 Study also
collects information on several important child outcomes, including
anthropometrics, child behaviors, and cognitive ability. This
information has been 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.
Data from the Three- and Five-Year In-Home Longitudinal Study of
Pre-School Aged Children are also available for download as a
standalone file. Similar information was also collected from
families at the Nine-Year wave. However, data for the In-Home
portion of the Nine-Year wave is contained in a combined file with
the Nine-Year core biological parent interviews.
Please register for the Fragile Families
data to get access. Documentation is available on the
documentation page.
Also available are the Three-Year Child Care Provider and Five-Year
Teacher Survey data. Register for downloading. Accompanying documention is found at the
documentation page.
Documentation
Please visit the Fragile Families website to download the documentation and find out more about
study and data files including:
- Guide to the public use data
- Questionnaires for all waves
- Sample design paper and weighting documentation
- Timeline for data availability, data alerts, and frequently asked questions (FAQ)
- Review publications and working papers using the Fragile Families data
- Latest Fragile Families News(data workshops, recent publications, press)
Contact Us
If you have any questions about the Fragile Families Study
or problems obtaining or using the data, please email us at
ffdatahelp@opr.princeton.edu.
Registration Required
To access these datasets, please login or register as a user of the data archive.
