ABSTRACT
Generally speaking, of all of the nonintact family structures researchers have examined over the past few decades, single-parent divorced families have received the greatest attention. Social scientists have consistently documented the downward impact that divorce exerts on academic achievement (Amato, 1993; Hetherington, 1999; Jeynes, 1998b; McLanahan and Sandefur, 1994; Wallerstein and Corbin, 1999). As the proportion of other family structures has grown, some social scientists have begun to study other less researched family structures as well. For example, as the population of never-married single mothers has grown, social scientists have examined the effects of this family structure on the well-being of children (Demo and Acock, 1996; Thomson, Hanson, and McLanahan, 1994). Zill and Rogers (1988) add, “the proportion of teen births outside of marriage almost doubled between 1970 and 1985, from 30 percent to 59 percent” (p. 81). These statistics actually do not totally address the problem of teenage sex, because pregnant teens today are much more likely to end their pregnancy by abortion than pregnant women of past generations (Zill and Rogers, 1988). Previously, many studies that examined the single unwed parent phenomenon often did not differentiate between this single-parent family structure and a divorced single-parent parent home when they did their analyses or stated their conclusions (Garfinkel and McLanahan, 1986; Rosenthal and Hansen, 1980). However, in most contemporary studies examining family structure, the vast majority of studies undertaken by social scientists have attempted to distinguish between different family structures as much as is reasonably possible (Hetherington 1999; Jeynes, 2000b; Ross, 1995).
