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Introduction
The Center for Families, Children & the Courts (CFCC) is conducting Kids 2000, a study of adolescents and young adults who experienced family breakup as children. They are being contacted nine years after their parents participated in court-based child custody mediation. This is one of a growing number of studies seeking the child’s perspective on the complexities of visitation and custody after parents separate. Kids 2000 combines data from now-grown children with measures taken prospectively about the legal process of custody determination.
Over the past seven years CFCC’s Statewide Uniform Statistical Reporting System (SUSRS) has conducted longitudinal studies of parents interviewed in the baseline surveys to gain insight into long-term outcomes for the families served by family court. Follow-up studies of the 1991 cohort were conducted in 1993 and 1996. The 1996 study (1991 Follow-Up II) focused on parents’ reports about their children, examining sources of risk and resiliency for children of divorced and separated parents.
We are now conducting a third follow-up study of the 1991 cohort (1991 Follow-Up III). In this project we are reinterviewing those parents as well as their children 16 and older who were the subjects of those 1991 child custody orders. The parents and children are being interviewed by telephone by our contractor, the Social and Behavioral Research Institute (SBRI) of California State University at San Marcos. The questionnaires used in the interviews were developed by CFCC in collaboration with family courts, then converted to a computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) system by SBRI.
Kids 2000 includes questions about:
- Changes children experienced because of their parents’ separation or divorce;
- Their living arrangements and relationships with parents during high school;
- Their perceptions of conflict and other kinds of problems in their families;
- Their self-assessment and experiences through high school; and
- Their current situation.
The children’s questionnaire focuses on the children’s reports of sources of risk and resilience in their lives and their current status on various indicators of well-being. We expect to begin publishing the results of this project in late 2001.
CFCC’s research program and individual research projects are strongly linked to the needs of the courts and court services providers. In general, the research helps identify areas and topics of concern that should be addressed in the extensive training for court-based mediators, investigators, and evaluators that CFCC provides. The results of the Kids 2000 study will be incorporated in future trainings.
Please contact CFCC@jud.ca.gov for more information.
