These groundbreaking estimates on family incarceration stem from the results of online and phone surveys conducted on a nationally representative sample of 4,041 adults age 18 and older in the summer of 2018. The survey was conducted in English and Spanish and asked about a wide range of experiences associated with the incarceration of an immediate family member including parents, siblings, children, spouses, and partners. This section describes the research team, survey development, methodology, and analysis conducted.

The survey was developed and overseen by a team of experts with deep knowledge of mass incarceration and survey methodology. This team included a contingent of researchers at Cornell University who have worked together extensively (Principal Investigator Christopher Wildeman, Peter Enns, Youngmin Yi, Maria Fitzpatrick, and Alyssa Goldman) and a number of other scholars of mass incarceration from other institutions (Sara Wakefield of Rutgers University, Hedwig Lee of Washington University, Megan Comfort of RTI International, Emily Wang of Yale School of Medicine, and Christopher Muller of the University of California Berkeley).

FWD.us staff worked closely with the research team throughout survey development and analysis.

The survey was developed in three stages, with a focus on the definition of immediate and extended family. In the first stage, the research team developed and circulated draft questions. In the second stage, the research team and FWD.us staff met in Ithaca, New York for a daylong conference to discuss the specifics of the survey. In the third and final stage, the feedback from this conference was funneled into a polished version of questions on family member incarceration that were improved in collaboration with the National Opinion Research Center, who administered the survey.

Through this development process, the decision was made to include both a narrow family question and a more expansive question that would account for and include non-traditional family structures. Immediate family was thus defined as parents, children, siblings, current romantic partners, and anyone else with whom a respondent had a child. For parents, children, and siblings, step, foster, and adoptive relatives were also included. This definition is close to a “traditional” or “nuclear” family definition but includes people (like co-parents) who would consistently have a major impact on an individual’s life if they were to be incarcerated.

In order not to bias the results by constraining the survey definition of family to a family structure that may be more common in certain less-impacted communities, however, a second family definition was included in the survey. This definition asked respondents if they had ever had any other family member they felt close to who experienced incarceration and then asked them to specify the relationship of the family member who had. By specifying “closeness” but allowing the respondent to define the parameters, the intent was to capture family members such as grandparents or cousins who might play a large role in the respondent’s life without forcing a narrow definition of “family.”

In addition to the core questions on family member incarceration, the research team included questions about the lives of individuals who had experienced family member incarceration. A host of questions on civic participation, health, own criminal justice contact, and opinions about the criminal justice system were also included in the survey. Because the survey is cross-sectional, none of these questions can be used to make causal claims about the effect of family member incarceration on individuals. But these questions nonetheless provide unique insight into the lives of those who experience family member incarceration and how their lives compare to similar individuals who did not experience it. Analysis on these additional data points will be released over the next year

The survey was fielded by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. NORC maintains a well-regarded AmeriSpeak panel. NORC uses field staff for in-person recruitment to enhance the number of young adults, households of lower socioeconomic status, households that lack access to the internet, and other hard-to-reach households are included in the panel. The survey was conducted in both Spanish and English, and could be taken over the computer or over the phone.

NORC conducted 4,041 surveys with adults in America over a roughly six-week period during July and August of 2018. All 1,808 respondents who answered the screener questions indicating that they had an immediate family member who had been incarcerated for one night or more was given the full survey. An additional randomly selected 1,010 individuals who did not report any immediate family member incarceration lasting longer than one night were asked to complete the full survey; these individuals were asked about extended family member incarceration experiences as well as other outcome variables and their own criminal history experience to provide a “control” group for further analysis. Response rates for the survey were well within the acceptable range, and all indications suggest that the final survey of respondents was extremely representative of all adults in America. Further details on the survey methodology are available in a peer-reviewed article authored by the academic research team.

All of the analyses of the survey data collected by NORC were weighted to be representative of the American adult population. All estimates were produced by members of the research team and FWD.us staff and cross-checked for accuracy. All analyses presented in this report are based on respondents who (1) said that they had ever had an immediate/extended family member incarcerated and (2) clarified the type of family member this person was in a series of follow-up questions. Just under five percent of the sample responded that they had ever had an immediate family member incarcerated but did not specify the family member type. These individuals were not included in counts of family member incarceration experience, thus making all of the estimates presented in this report somewhat conservative.

Demographic information was provided by NORC from their AmeriSpeak panel information rather than asked in the survey itself. Political party identification, household income, religious affiliation, race/ethnicity, and other demographic information is self-reported upon recruitment into the panel.

When a respondent identified that more than one family member had spent time in jail or prison, one family member was randomly selected for follow-up questions. In total prevalence numbers, the incarceration duration presented is the longest duration for any family member incarceration spell reported by the respondent, but for some of the follow-up questions pertaining to a specific family member the length of incarceration related to that randomly selected individual is used.