Cover: Measuring Cohabitation in Add Health

Measuring Cohabitation in Add Health

Published In: Handbook of Measurement Issues in Family Research / edited by Sandra L. Hofferth, Lynne M. Casper (Mahwah, N.J. : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007), ch. 3, p. 35-52

Posted on RAND.org on January 01, 2007

by Michael S. Pollard, Kathleen Mullan Harris

Cohabitation is swiftly and increasingly becoming a normative experience, and researchers have been forced to respond quickly to keep up with the rapid changes. The authors document cohabitation data from the recent third wave of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). They present a variety of ways to measure cohabiting unions, both qualitatively and by the length of time a couple has lived together, and discuss the implications of these different definitions for the levels of cohabitation in the Add Health sample.

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