How important is parent-child closeness to children's health and educational outcomes later in life? How does poverty and material hardship impact family functioning and parenting behaviors? How do genetic characteristics interact with social environments to influence child and adolescent wellbeing?
These are just a few of the questions the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) can help researchers answer. Founded by scholars at Princeton and Columbia Universities, the FFCWS is the longest-running and only contemporary US birth cohort study of young adults, based on a national sample, that follows children from birth through young adulthood. It is used by more than 13,000 researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to understand the effects of poverty, family structure, education, employment, income, health, housing, and resource sharing on human development.
Following her appointment as co-investigator of FFCWS in 2024, Anna Haskins, the Andrew V. Tackes Associate Professor of Sociology, set out to expand engagement with the dataset at the University of Notre Dame and throughout the Midwest. In collaboration with Notre Dame Population Analytics (ND Pop) and with support from the Poverty Initiative, Haskins launched FFCWS@ND as a regional hub to encourage research using the dataset and collaboration across disciplines.
“The challenges that poverty presents are many, and it will take a wide range of research approaches to tackle them. In partnership with ND Pop, the Poverty Initiative is delighted to support FFCWS@ND so that the Notre Dame community can utilize what is arguably the best dataset for understanding the intergenerational effects of poverty in America,” said Jim Sullivan, director of the Notre Dame Poverty Initiative and professor of economics.
The inaugural FFCWS Data Conference, hosted on April 23-24, was the first phase of a multi-year plan to advance poverty-related research with the dataset. The event brought together 60 scholars including faculty, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and study leadership from universities across the Midwest, including Notre Dame, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Chicago, Purdue University, University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Michigan State University, and the University of Illinois.
“The Future of Families study is housed on the East Coast, and it is widely used among scholars there. My vision is to build usage across the country, starting with Notre Dame and regionally in the Midwest, by facilitating learning about the data and providing opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration among regional researchers,” Haskins said. “The broader aim is to build capacity to leverage the data to ask and answer critical poverty-related questions to drive policy change, and to really generate real-world solutions and advanced knowledge.”
To turn that vision into reality, the conference featured a comprehensive introduction to the data, along with presentations from FFCWS principal investigators Kathy Edin (Princeton University) and Jane Waldfogel (Columbia University), who shared the history and current data collection efforts for year 27 of the study. FFCWS data analysts provided an overview of the data available and how to access it, and regional researchers who have worked extensively with the data helped attendees envision how it could be used in their own research.
Lonnie Berger (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Maggie Thomas (University of Chicago) highlighted how scholars have used the study to understand economic, social, and environmental influences on poverty and material hardship, how poverty impacts family functioning and wellbeing, and how it persists across generations. Marcy Carlson (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Christine Percheski (Northwestern University) focus their research on family formation and structure; looking at parent relationships to each other and potentially to new partners which provides vast insight into children's exposure to resources, stress, and stability.
Notre Dame’s Elizabeth Shewark, the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families Collegiate Chair, explored how contextual influences like families, schools, and neighborhoods interact with genetic factors to impact youth's social, emotional, and academic competencies. Colter Mitchell (University of Michigan) presented his work identifying childhood biomarkers for medical conditions like cardiovascular disease, cancer, and dementia to increase the potential for early identification.
As the two-day conference concluded, Haskins was already working on other dimensions of her plan for FFCWS@ND.
“One of the broader goals of Notre Dame is to be a force of good in the world, particularly among the marginalized and those experiencing poverty,” Haskins said. “It’s a natural fit to bring a data set that can really answer those questions to researchers here at Notre Dame and beyond.”
To support this work, FFCWS@ND provides practical resources aimed at lowering barriers to data access and analysis. Future plans include hosting two more data conferences. FFCWS@ND Postdoctoral Fellows will soon be available to assist ND Pop faculty affiliates in accessing data to research critical poverty-related questions. For Notre Dame faculty and students, small research grants of up to $5,000 will be available on a rolling basis to incentivize use of FFCWS data and help cover costs associated with accessing the restricted data.
For more information on FFCWS@ND, visit ND Pop at populationanalytics.nd.edu.
Originally published by at populationanalytics.nd.edu on May 12, 2026.