Measuring family boundary ambiguity in cohabiting stepfamilies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objective Our study introduces a novel approach to gauging family boundary ambiguity using information obtained from just one household reporter. It also illuminates the strengths and challenges presented by parent pointers in federal surveys. Background The prominence of boundary ambiguity in cohabiting stepfamilies leads to significant measurement challenges, which take on greater salience as more children experience this family type. Method Drawing on the 2019–2022 Current Population Survey (CPS), we assessed boundary ambiguity within cohabiting stepfamilies ( N = 4133) by examining whether reporting the stepparent as the child's second parent differed by household reporter type: biological parent versus cohabiting partner. Logistic regressions showed the roles of sociodemographic, family, and child correlates of family boundary ambiguity by household reporter type. Results Boundary ambiguity in cohabiting stepfamilies was high, with over 80% of reporters not identifying the cohabiting partner as the child's second parent. Parents more often experienced boundary ambiguity (91%) than did partners (68%). Parents with more economic resources than their partners were more likely to experience boundary ambiguity. Joint children were negatively related to boundary ambiguity. Conclusion This study shows most parents and partners in cohabiting stepfamilies do not view the partner as a second parent. It also reveals the ramifications of the CPS parent pointers that restrict respondents to reporting only two “parents,” tacitly reinforcing the two‐biological parent norm.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".