Family Well-Being Research Network (“FAM-NET”): Measuring Family Well-Being across the Lifespan

Project start and end dates: 6/24/2021- 5/31/2025

Background: 
Emotional well-being includes life satisfaction, life purpose, and positive emotions. The understanding and measurement of emotional well-being can have important effects on health. Many unknowns exist about the complex ways physical health, emotional well-being, and quality of life interact, especially within families.

Objectives:
This project will create and support a network of researchers in this emerging  field to understand the effects of emotional well-being on health and public health, and to speed collaborative research in this area. To do this we will: 

1) Encourage and support the use of emotional well-being measures by creating a website of measurement surveys, datasets, and educational materials; 

2) Pilot projects: Fund pilot projects related to the measurement of emotional well-being across the life-span; and 

3) Scholar Corps: Identify researchers to join a year-long mentorship program to develop the skills needed to become the next leaders in the field of family well-being.

Research Topics & Methods:

  • Family spillover

Implications:
Our network will advance the measurement of emotional well-being of families as a unit, of family members in relation to an individual, and of informal caregivers within families.

Website: www.fam-net.org

Funding statement:
This project is supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute Of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number U24HD107562

Collaborators:
mPIs:
Lisa Prosser, PhD
Marilyn Fisher Blanch Research Professor of Pediatrics, University of Michigan

Eve Wittenberg, PhD
Senior Research Scientist, Harvard University

Janel Hanmer, MD, PhD
Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh

For more information, please contact:
Lisa Prosser, PhD, MS
Director, Susan B. Meister Child Health Evaluation and Research Center

Email: lisapros@umich.edu

Angela Rose
Project Manager

Email: angmrose@umich.edu