Natcher Center, Building 45, NIH Campus

The NICHD Family and Child Well-Being Research Network

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. DHHS

The Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics

The Demographic and Behavioral Sciences Branch, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, U.S. DHHS and

The Maryland Population Research Center

The purpose of this conference, “Measurement Issues in Family Demography,” is to describe why and how the measurement of family related demographic phenomena matters and to discuss and recommend how best to improve current data collection practices to more accurately depict family change and behavior. This conference is a follow-up to a workshop “Counting Couples: Improving Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, and Cohabitation Data in the Federal Statistical System, held December 13 and 14, 2001 at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD.

The objective of the Counting Couples workshop was to understand what is being collected in the federal statistical system on marriage, divorce, remarriage and cohabitation, to show the limitations of the data that are currently available, to discuss how to improve the quality and comparability of this information, and to prioritize a list of recommendations pinpointing areas in need of improvement. The Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics produced a report presenting the highlights of this workshop and describing the fourteen targets of opportunity that were identified by national experts at the workshop. These targets of opportunity were divided into two broad groups reflecting the need to improve both the measurement of marriage, divorce, remarriage, and cohabitation data, and the measurement of the causes and consequences of union, formation, dissolution, and family change.

Each of the sessions in this follow-up conference addresses some aspect of the targets of opportunity resulting from the Counting Couples workshop. The goals of this conference are to:

describe the problem or issue of measurement to be addressed and why accurate measurement is important,
summarize how the demographic phenomenon is measured currently in both public and private survey data collection,
discuss limitations in current measurement, including whether measures accurately reflect the diversity in, and causes and consequences of, family behavior, and
make concrete recommendations for improving measures.