How it started

It has been since 1988 that a study in the US focused on couples, plus, I had questions that I could not answer with other data. With NICHD funding and Gallup’s probability panel, we set out in 2020 to recruit 600 same-gender and 600 different-gender couples.

Then, right before we were going in the field, the pandemic hit. We pivoted, and we collected data from September 2020 to April 2021 — in the middle of a global pandemic and a racial reckoning. We revised the questionnaire, and the study grew. We collected oversamples of same-gender couples, of bisexual people in different-gender relationships, of Black, Hispanic, and Asian American couples, and we ended with 3,642 main respondents between 20 and 60 — about 40% of them were not heterosexual — plus 1,515 of their partners.

What NCHAT collects

We are passionate about measurement. Beyond our rich baseline survey — relationship functioning, mental and physical health, discrimination, racial trauma, stressors, identity — respondents and their partners completed 24-hour time diaries with embedded measures of momentary wellbeing, so we can see not just how couples described their lives but how they actually spent them, minute by minute.

Then we went under the skin. NCHAT-BIO, built with clinical health psychologist Lisa Christian, collected dried blood spots from almost 800 respondents in 2020–21 to measure inflammation and immune function. We’re now collecting whole blood from two thousand respondents nationwide to study chronic stress and biological aging through DNA methylation — making NCHAT one of the only studies anywhere that can link our daily lives, stress, and epigenetic aging in a population-representative sample.

And NCHAT keeps growing: we collected additional data in 2022. And in 2025, in addition to our follow-up survey from our returning respondents, we collected a new refresher sample of over eleven hundred cohabiting and married respondents in their twenties, known as NCHAT Young Adult, or NCHAT-YA.

What we’re learning

The pandemic was not experienced equally. Sexual minority adults carried more COVID stress and more racial trauma stress than their heterosexual peers, and bisexual+ adults showed elevated depression and anxiety. Black and LGBTQ+ parents reported higher parenting stress — driven in part by discrimination in healthcare itself, the very system families were depending on. Among Asian American respondents, pandemic-era discrimination was linked to more anxiety and depression and lower life satisfaction.

The biology told the same story in a different language. Sexual minority adults showed distinct patterns of inflammation and immune function, and minority stress was associated with accelerated epigenetic aging — bisexual+ women were on average nine years older biologically than their chronological age.

And because NCHAT links to IPUMS CDOH, we can see how policy environments matter: as state policies become less protective, discrimination rose fastest for transgender and gender non-conforming people. Context isn’t background — it’s a mechanism.