Alisa Feldman

Since the mid-twentieth century, the composition of families in the U.S. has changed dramatically. Building on existing work on Americans’ attitudes toward different family configurations, in this study, I employ a conjoint survey experiment to further explore the question: in this era of tremendous family diversity, what do U.S. adults consider to be a “family”? This conjoint experiment aims to isolate, and compare between, the effects of different attributes of an arrangement of people on the likelihood that the arrangement seems more like a family to U.S. adults. I also explore how these effects compare across different socio-demographic and political groups.