In 2015, the Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) continued contributing to public discourse through the dissemination of reliable research. CCF’s impact has grown over previous years in the quantity of coverage, the diversity of media outlets (and presumably, audiences), and social media influence. This year, nearly 250 unique media pieces have been influenced by CCF briefs and experts, and have been circulated via shares, likes, tweets, pins, etc., on social media more than 149,000 times. Keep in mind that this is an extreme lower bound of CCF’s influence, since we don’t recount the hundreds of reprints of CCF coverage. The five releases below are some of this year’s most successful.

1-28-15: Sandra Hofferth reported in “Child-Rearing Norms and Practices in Contemporary American Families” that on key parenting measures—such as reading and meals together, regulating TV watching, and involving children in extracurricular activities—children in married-parent households fared slightly better than those in single-parent households. The differences were much more stark, however, when poor and non-poor families of all types were compared, suggesting a spurious relationship between family structure and child outcomes. Hofferth argued that those who are poor are less likely both to be able to engage in these crucial child-rearing activities and to marry. Thus, marriage is not necessarily a direct route to improved child welfare. Coverage of this report appeared in least 51 media outlets, including Christian Science Monitor, Good Housekeeping, Real Clear Policy, and NBC News.

3-5-15: On the 50^th anniversary of the release of The Moynihan Report, CCF scholars contributed to the online symposium, “Moynihan +50: Family Structure Still Not the Problem,” in which Stephanie Coontz, Philip N. Cohen, Heidi Hartmann, Jeff Hayes, Chandra Childers, and William H. Chafe focused their attention on Moynihan’s formulation that black poverty is the result of black family structure, especially single-mother households. The series authors argued that Moynihan’s claim of pathology itself created barriers to achieving racial equality. Yes, there was an increase in single-mother families since the 1960s, but poverty and crime decreased, highlighting the weakness of marriage-promotion for poverty reduction. The report was covered in at least 27 media outlets, including the History News Network, Washington Post, New York Times, and Deseret News.

5-7-15: In the “CCF Symposium on Housework, Gender, and Parenting,” CCF’s Stephanie Coontz, Jill Yavorsky, Claire Kamp Dush, Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, Arielle Kuperberg, Oriel Sullivan, Jonathan Gershuny, John Robinson, and Liana C. Sayer acknowledge that men have increased their contributions to housework, but that gender inequality persists in less dramatic and more subtle forms, particularly when the couple are parents. This release informed articles in more than 100 media outlets, including Cosmopolitan, Time, ABC News, Washington Post, Pacific Standard, The LA Times, and Tech Times.

7-1-15: Celeste Curington, Ken-Hou Lin, and Jennifer Lundquist revealed in “Dating Partners Don’t Always Prefer ‘Their Own Kind’: Some Multiracial Daters Get Bonus Points in the Dating Game,” that dating “racial hierarchies” have changed so that some multiracial groups—Asian-white and Hispanic-white in particular—are responded to as frequently, and sometimes more frequently, than certain mono-racial individuals. “Some” is the key word, however; bi-racial blacks appeared more favorable than mono-racial blacks (and mono-racial Asian and Hispanic Men), but still ranked relatively low in response rates compared to white, Asian-white, and Hispanic-white individuals. The study was covered by more than 20 media sources, including Time, NBC News, Washington Post, Market Watch, Vox, and the New York Times. This report was one of many that made its way to overseas audiences, appearing on a Malaysian news source, Astro Awani.

9-16-15: Kelly Musick and Katherine Michelmore provided a new answer to an old question: “What Happens When Couples Marry After the First Baby?” For couples whose first child was born between 1985 and 1995, the risk of divorce was higher among cohabiters (who went on to marry after the baby) versus those who married before the birth of their child. Times changed, though, and cohabiting couples whose first child was born after 1997 were no more likely to divorce than those who married prior to the birth of their child. The researchers found that those couples that never married were still at higher risk for break-up, and outlined potential risk factors for couple instability. This report was a knowledge-base for articles in at least 47 media outlets, including USA Today, Huffington Post, The Stir, and Yahoo Parenting, which were liked or shared more than 28,000 times on social media.

The briefs released from CCF over past years compound our influence. As just one example, Arielle Kuperberg’s March 2014 “Does Premarital Cohabitation Raise your Risk of Divorce?” (it doesn’t) was featured in 11 new articles on the topic throughout 2015 in a variety of media outlets including Cosmopolitan, Deseret News, and Medical Daily, which have been circulated on social media at least 6,200 times! This is added to the 37 times the work was covered in 2014. If history serves as a guide, CCF will bring reliable research on families to an even larger and more diverse audience in the coming year.

Braxton Jones is a graduate student in sociology at the University of New Hampshire, and serves as a CCF Graduate Research and Public Affairs Scholar.