UNDERSTANDING RESILIENCY IN CHILDREN WITH ABSENT FATHERS

The central objective of the proposed research is to examine the effects of the stability of family resources as the level of resources on a variety of child outcomes, including health, cognitive and social-emotional measures. It aims to understand resilience in children exposed to father absence and it pays special attention to the diverse life histories that lead to positive outcomes among this group of high-risk children. The overarching theoretical position is that child well-being -- resiliency and vulnerability -- are the result of a cumulation of positive and negative influences of family resources and an individual's reactions to them. Inmost instances no single resource/reaction pair is decisive for explaining any particular outcome. It is the cooccurrence of diverse combinations of family resources and their sequencing that is central to the well-being outcome formulations herein. Boolean string techniques are applied to investigate determinants of children's resiliency, to identify particular combinations of family resource levels and changes in levels that are associated with positive child outcomes, and to delineate the diverse pathways to success in these children's unfolding life course.