Celebrating 10 Years!

September 25, 2017

National Center for Family & Marriage Research


Drs. Susan Brown & Wendy Manning


	Original NCMR logo

"On September 25, 2007, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services , under the auspices of ASPE, announced a $900,000 cooperative agreement to establish the first-ever National Center for Marriage Research to improve our understanding of how marriage and family structure affect the health and well-being of individuals, families, children, and communities, and to inform policy development and programmatic responses. In addition to supporting interdisciplinary research on marriage and family structure, the National Center for Marriage Research will develop research capacity and widely disseminate findings. The awardee for the national center is Bowling Green State University ."

Fast forward 10 years, and you will find National Center for Family & Marriage Research (renamed in 2009) Co-directors Drs. Wendy Manning and Susan Brown, Center for Family and Demographic Research (CFDR) Associate Director Karen Guzzo, and the staff and students of the NCFMR and CFDR continuing to forward their three-fold mission: research, training, and dissemination.


Current logo redesigned in 2009


	Fall 2017 staff and students

--Staff

--Students

--Research Affiliates

Visit the People page to view all of our past and present committee members, scholars, postdoctoral fellows, and grant awardees.

Research


	County-level Marriage and Divorce Data

From The Data Source and Measures Snapshots to our Original Data and Family Profiles, we have grown our Data Resources selection more than ten-fold in the past ten years. Our most popular resource, Family Profiles, now boasts a collection of more than 150 original reports summarizing the latest statistics on U.S. families.


Bloomberg reports, "Divorce Rate Plunges to 35-Year Low"

The first profile, "Marriage Rate in the U.S., 2008," was written in 2009 by Graduate Research Assistant Krista K. Payne, who now serves as a social science data analyst. The most popular profile on our website is former Graduate Research Assistant Lydia Anderson's "Divorce Rate in the U.S.: Geographic Variation, 2015," which has been viewed almost 11,000 times on our website since its release in December 2016.


	Gray Divorce team L to R: Graduate Students Matthew Wright & Anna Hammersmith, and Drs. Susan Brown & I-Fen Lin

Our most talked about topic in the news over the years has been gray divorce, cited in media outlets such as WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, and Forbes. Gray divorce has also been discussed on several popular television and radio programs.

The NCFMR has hosted/co-hosted almost three dozen research conferences and workshops over the years and continues to work toward building a strong family data and research infrastructure.

Training

We have mentored and trained 37 BGSU graduate and undergraduate students since 2007, in addition to many more across the nation, ensuring advancement in research on family structure. Graduate and undergraduate research assistants and graduate research fellows have helped build NCFMR's extensive set of data resources. In addition, many of these students have presented their research at national conferences, including the Population Association of America (PAA) and the National Conference on Family Relations (NCFR). They have also presented posters and papers at NCFMR conferences, including County Couples, Counting Families and Fathers & Fathering in Contemporary Contexts.

Check out our entire collection of conference presentations and posters.

The NCFMR hosted a total of three postdoctoral fellows and visiting scholars between 2008 - 2011. Sarah Halpern-Meekin, Michael Roettger, and David Warner contributed to our data resources through working papers, conference posters, and Pilot Data.

Dissemination


	Graduate Research Assistant Bart Stykes takes time to view research posters at the NCFMR Fathers & Fathering Conference in Bethesda, MD, 2012

We translate and disseminate our research findings to policymakers, program practitioners, and research communities through a dedicated website (avg. 51,000 visitors a year), a collection of 59 working papers, several research briefs, conference proceedings, News and Notes, with an ever-increasing readership of more than 2,000, and other electronic mailings.

Staff, students, and affiliates have presented almost 150 posters and papers during national and NCFMR conferences, which can be viewed in our expansive collection.

The NCFMR entered the social media scene in 2010 and Tweeted the December 2010 edition of News and Notes. We have since posted 533 tweets and have 584 followers. Facebook followed in February 2011 when we announced the PAA conference. Our audience has grown to 1,200 followers who can peruse our 585 posts.

Please join our social media platforms to get real-time updates of our family research. You may also sign up for News & Notes. Simply click one of the logos or use the links within the text.

If you would like to support NCFMR research, visit BGSU Online Giving. Be sure to indicate the NCFMR by clicking the Fund Options link under Gift Information in step two.