Divorced Parents’ Qualitative and Quantitative Reports of Children's Living Arrangements

We use data from a sample of divorced parents in Wisconsin (N = 1,392) to examine how parents describe their children's living arrangements. When the children spend substantial time in both parents' homes, both parents are less likely to use the phrase live with to describe living arrangements. When children spend most nights with their mother, mothers are more likely than fathers to state that the children live with their mother. Together, these findings suggest that family researchers no longer can rely on simple questions to capture complex living arrangements. We need clearer and more careful question wording and, in some instances, follow-up questions to accurately describe where children live. Key Words: children, divorced parents, household composition, living arrangements, measurement errors, Wisconsin. Family sociology, especially in the United States, relies extensively on survey data that assume that family members live together. The changing demography of U.S. families challenges this assumption. Nonresident fathers' relationships with children after divorce show that important family relationships sometimes span household boundaries. Our article addresses this challenge by asking how mothers and fathers understand questions about where their children live. Questions about who lives together are the basis of household-based surveys and censuses, determine which children are treated as coresident and which are treated as having an "absent" parent who might still be an important family member, and define the resources and needs counted in estimates of childhood poverty that contribute to important policy debates. Very little research treats the essential element of household enumeration as problematic. Most studies use only qualitative evidence, are primarily concerned with adults, or are limited by their focus on subgroups such as the homeless or those likely to be homeless. Other studies have design flaws that prevent clear comparisons between qualitative and quantitative assessments of where children live. We advance previous work by combining qualitative and quantitative evidence in a way that recognizes the need to improve survey measurement in light of the new demography of children's families. The accuracy of our picture of separated families developed in sample surveys depends on the accuracy of parents' reports in household rosters about where children live, as does the extent of coverage error in the decennial census for children in these families. But exactly where the children in a separated family actually live is sometimes ambiguous in ways that can lead to errors. For example, recent increases in the number of children whose parents have joint placement contributed to the problem of duplicate enumeration in the 2000 census (National Academies Letter Report, 2001). Responding to questions about where children live may be particularly challenging when children spend time in both parents' homes. In such situations, whether the child lives someplace may not be a simple dichotomy, and the judgment that a child lives with the mother, for example, may be associated with a spectrum of arrangements. Most literature on the accuracy of household roster enumeration comes from studies of coverage errors in the decennial census. Previous researchers have found that a household informant's report of living arrangements largely depends on the number of nights that people spend at the dwelling unit (Tourangeau, Shapiro, Kearney, & Ernst, 1997). The reliability of an informant's report is low when someone spends a substantial amount of time away from the household (Martin, 1999). When someone visits a household repeatedly, it may be difficult for a household informant to decide whether that person usually lives in the household (Bates & Gerber, 1998). Using cognitive interviews about living arrangements described in vignettes and standardized follow-up questions asking about the definitions of live and stay with respondents in the Living Situation Survey, Gerber and Bates (Gerber, 1990, 1993; Gerber & Bates, 1994) looked at how answers about whether a person lives in a household might be affected by the language used to inquire about residence. …