Social Resilience & Polyamorous Families

Research that follows families over time.

The Social Resilience study is CFJR’s flagship longitudinal research program. Beginning in fall 2017, the study has followed 64 polyamorous families across Canada through continuous ethnographic engagement — producing a dataset of extraordinary depth and nuance.

The study examines how polyamorous families navigate institutional exclusion across multiple domains: healthcare systems that do not recognise their family structures, IPVA services that require survivors to misrepresent their relationships, co-parenting arrangements that lack legal standing, and housing and financial systems built for couples and nuclear families.

At the same time, the study documents the remarkable adaptive resilience strategies that these families develop in response to that exclusion — strategies that reveal not only the costs of non-recognition, but also the creativity and mutual care that non-normative families bring to the work of building lives together.

What the data shows.

Seven years of fieldwork have produced findings that are both methodologically robust and policy-urgent. The headline finding — that 97% of IPVA survivors in this study had to misrepresent their family structure to access support services — represents a systemic failure that demands structural reform.

Beyond IPVA, the study documents extensive healthcare exclusion, including cases where family members were denied access to partners in medical emergencies; co-parenting arrangements rendered legally invisible, creating catastrophic risks in cases of relationship breakdown or death; and housing and financial systems that fail to accommodate household structures outside the couple norm.