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Research Resources

Find and share professional documents—from curricula to articles to presentations. Our Professional Resource Library is a great way for NCFR members and active Certified Family Life Educators to pool knowledge on a wide variety of family topics.

Please refer to Terms of Use for guidelines on submitting to the NCFR website. Materials must be relevant to family and/or social sciences. NCFR reserves the right to reject any submission at its sole discretion.

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for Members ONLY

NCFR Report Family Focus section, summer 2013 (PDF)

NCFR members examine data and trends in family-related topics such as multi-generational households, children and media use, “gray divorce,” changes in family composition, and the use of longitudinal studies.

Renee Ellis
for Members ONLY

Changes in coresidence of grandparents and grandchildren

by Renee Ellis, U.S. Census Bureau, Family and Fertility Statistics Branch

Although two-parent families are still the majority family form, families that include grandparents and their grandchildren have been increasing. The concern over the increase of children living with grandparents, particularly in skipped-generation families, where children lived with grandparents without parents present, was large enough to convene a 1992 hearing  to focus on grandparents and spur research investigating the causes.

Steven Ruggles
for Members ONLY

New data for the comparative study of family and household composition

by Steven Ruggles, Ph.D., Regents Professor of History and Population Studies; Director, Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota

The quantity of individual-level census data suitable for comparative study of family and household composition is expanding at an accelerating pace, opening new opportunities for discovery and analysis of the ongoing transformation of family forms around the world. Recent large-scale international collaborations have provided scholars with access to hundreds of millions of records from hundreds of data sets, and projects now underway are poised to disseminate an avalanche of new data during the coming few years.

Bernard Nauck, Daniel Fuss
for Members ONLY

The German Family Panel pairfam — A new data resource for family researchers

by Bernhard Nauck, Ph.D., professor, Institute of Sociology, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany; and Daniel Fuss, Ph.D., Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany

The German Family Panel pairfam (Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics) is a comprehensive panel survey providing an extended empirical basis for advances in family research. Its data are available to the international family research community.

Daniel Lichter
for Members ONLY

Studying families: Why demography matters

by Daniel T. Lichter, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Cornell Population Center, Cornell University

Demography provides an intellectual bridge that connects allied social science disciplines in ways that reinforce multidisciplinary exchange and research collaboration. The growing intellectual ties between demography and other mainstream social science disciplines are interdependent in ways that benefit us all.

SRCD brief: "Preserving and Enhancing Responsible Conduct of Research Involving Children"

For the first time in 20 years, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is considering changes to federal regulations governing protections for people who participate in research. The proposed changes to the policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, known as the Common Rule, represent a watershed moment. By providing scientists and institutional review boards (IRBs)—independent ethics committees that review, approve, and monitor studies involving human subjects — updated guidance, a revised Common Rule will provide a framework for protecting human subjects for decades to come.

A Framework for Advancing the Well-Being and Self-Sufficiency of At-Risk Youth

A new report presents a conceptual framework for efforts to prepare at-risk youth for healthy adult functioning and self-sufficiency. Produced as part of the Youth Demonstration Development project for the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, the framework explains how we can build our knowledge about what works for at-risk youth, by implementing and testing research-informed interventions to promote youth’s resilience and human capital. An issue brief summarizes the framework.

Risk and Resilience in Homeless Children. Children's Mental Health eReview

The Children's Mental Health eReview, provided through the University of Minnesota Extension, Children, Youth & Family Consortium summarizes children's mental health research and implications for practice and policy.

In this issue, learn about research related to the strengths and needs of homeless children, and explore ideas for how to use creative research-based interventions in a variety of settings.

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Core Intervention Components: Identifying and Operationalizing What Makes Programs Work

The brief offers a definition of “core components,” discusses challenges and processes related to identifying and validating them, highlights rationales for the importance of operationalizing core components, and explores implications for selecting, funding, implementing, scaling up, and evaluating programs. This is one of four research briefs prepared under the auspices of an ASPE contract entitled Emphasizing Evidence-Based Programs for Children and Youth: An Examination of Policy Issues and Practice Dilemmas Across Federal Initiatives.

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The Importance of Quality Implementation for Research, Practice, and Policy

This research brief discusses some of the fundamentals of quality program implementation that have been identified through research and practice and that may be useful for practitioners and researchers alike. The brief defines quality program implementation, and highlights the importance of a high quality implementation, identifies 23 factors that affect implementation, discusses 14 steps in achieving quality implementation (10 of which need to occur before a program starts), and notes that responsibility for quality implementation is shared by key stakeholders.