Transactional Family Processes
Supporting Father Involvement and Child Well-Being
Our Partnership
We worked with a variety of academic and community partners to explore transactional family process models that examine how couple relationship and co-parenting relationship quality relate to father involvement. The research and ingenuity achieved by collaborating with partners from the University of Michigan and other institutions was essential as we worked to find ways to strengthen families and improve children's lives.
About DU Research
We leverage cross-institutional collaboration to address some of today’s most pressing challenges, producing interdisciplinary solutions that influence policymakers to effectively serve the public good. From Stanford to UChicago to NYU, we’ve refined our collaborative process through years of mutually beneficial relationships with institutions nationwide to understand and address challenges like climate change, HIV and youth homelessness.
DU’s current research efforts have been featured in news outlets like The New York Times. They include…
- exploring the effects of felony disenfranchisement.
- employing lasers as the medium for quantum science.
- using theatre to heal and rehabilitate inmates.
About the Project
This project examined how transactional family processes (where family members influence each other), particularly couple relationships and co-parenting relationships, affect father involvement in fragile families, and how that relates to child well-being and socio-emotional outcomes.
The project used longitudinal data from more than 5,000 racially diverse, low-income families from the Building Strong Families study. Our goal was to better understand the processes that relate to father involvement and child well-being, and to develop methods for increasing both.
Collaborators on the project included the University of Denver, the University of Michigan and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute Of Child Health & Human Development.