ABSTRACT
Gathering data from parents living separately presents many challenges. For example, it is often difficult to locate both parents, and when they are interviewed, they tend to provide different accounts of the nonresident parent's involvement with the same child (Schaeffer et al., 1991; Sonenstein & Calhoun, 1990). Furthermore, family and household configurations are complicated by the addition of new relationships (e.g., step-relationships) that evolve over time and the dynamic nature of the residential patterns of children who often reside with different parents at different times of the year or at different times in their childhood (Manning & Smock, 2000).
