Family complexity that results when adults have children with multiple partners (multiple-partner fertility) is quite common. It also has important implications for understanding child support outcomes and for designing and evaluating welfare and family policy. Using a unique set of merged administrative data, this article provides the first comprehensive documentation of levels of family complexity among a broad sample of welfare recipients. The analyses suggest that family complexity is very common and also that complexity is associated with systematically different child support outcomes. (author abstract)

This article is based on a working paper published by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin.