Family Complexity and Children's Outcomes in the UK: A Longitudinal Approach

This project aims to study the consequences of family complexity (e.g. parental separation and repartnering) for children's outcomes, which will for example include health, behaviour, or well-being. We will utilise secondary data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) for our analyses.

This study will employ a quantitative design using advanced longitudinal methods to answer the following questions aiming to fill the gaps in current research:

How do changes in family structure influence children's outcomes?
Does repartnering/step-family experience reduce children's wellbeing?
What are the short- and long-term effects of family complexity on children's outcomes?
Are there differences between socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds?

Firstly, we will use multi-process models to analyse parents' family life transitions and children's outcomes accounting for both changes in family structure and children's outcomes.

Secondly, multi-channel sequence analysis (MCSA) will be employed to model each individual's life as a sequence of events. MCSA is a data mining approach where it is possible to simultaneously model more life dimensions, such as family structure or children's outcomes as interrelated channels.

Thirdly, we will compare our results across socio-economic and ethnic groups.