A Decade of Studying American Families

March 2025

Ten years have passed since the American Family Survey began collecting data about Americans’ opinions about families—their importance, their health, their needs—and therefore what policies will be most beneficial and popular across party lines. The research is spearheaded by the BYU College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences and highlights how American families are changing over time.

“I started working on the project and learned that it wasn’t only about like, ‘This is what we saw in 2024,’ but it was also about, ‘Here are trends we saw throughout this past decade,’” says Ellie Mitchell, an undergraduate research assistant who analyzed the data. “When I started the project, they had 10 years of data, but they hadn’t really combined it.”

Mitchell is majoring in political science with an emphasis on research and analysis; she was hired specifically for her skills in data analysis and visualization. “The survey included similar questions every year, but sometimes the response options were a little bit different, or the variable name was slightly different,” she says. “I was responsible for lining up the data year by year.”

Among the trends Mitchell and her professors found when they examined the survey results are these:

• There is a growing concern for the economic challenges families face (up 20 points).
• Americans are less concerned with cultural issues, such as declining religion and an increase in sexual permissiveness (down 19 points).
• There is a decline in concern for structural issues, such as single-parent homes and a lack of parental discipline.

“People generally think their own family is doing pretty well, though they still have concerns for their families, especially economic concerns,” Mitchell says. “But they think families in general are doing much worse.”

After she graduates, Mitchell is hoping to secure a predoctoral position while she applies to PhD programs in political science where she can study political behavior. Regardless, she’ll remember this inspiring learning experience and what she learned through her involvement with the project—not only about data analysis but also about families.

“One of the main takeaways is that families are very important in everyday life,” she says. “Having a family is really important economically. [The professors] want to show policymakers how we can combine in a bipartisan effort to really strengthen American families and the American public as a whole.”