More on Divorce

Just one more chunk of offerings on divorce. It’s more about the possible effects of divorce and comes from a couple of articles I found a little while ago in some academic journals - all fairly up to date. To me it seemed topical and interesting. If you have time and it seems something you can easily incorporate into your last minute revision, by all means do so. And, as the AS Paper 1 looms, I will do an extra blog tomorrow on conjugal roles - one of the large areas I have so far covered.

Here are two studies which come to different conclusions. Read them and decide which you feel is most valid.

Bren Neale and Jennifer Flowerdew

Research led by Dr Bren Neale and Dr. Jennifer Flowerdew, at the Centre for Research on Family, Kinship and Childhood, University of Leeds, examined in depth the changing lives of young people whose parents have divorced or separated. It tracked the lives and experiences of young people (N=58) over three or four years.

Key findings
• It is wrong to assume that multiple changes in a child’s life after divorce are necessarily detrimental. Rather, it is the nature of these changes, how quickly they occur and their cumulative effect that are significant.

• Divorce and its consequences should not be regarded as the central factor to define children and determine their chances in life after a marriage break-up. Many are pre-occupied with a whole range of personal or family issues that may have arisen after divorce but were not necessarily a consequence of it.

• Relationships between young people and their parents are played out in various and complex ways. For example, the success or otherwise of living with a parent can depend on whether it is based on a flexible and supportive arrangement with the young person having a large measure of control. A rigid regime can become a real trial for youngsters.

• Divorce must not be centre of the equation. It is important to see the lives of young people in a broad context rather than purely through their parents’ divorce. Many involved in the Leeds study faced a range of personal or family-related challenges that followed their parents’ separation, but were not necessarily due to it. These included issues around sexuality, schooling, economic hardship and redundancy, higher education, friendships, long term limiting illness, terminal illness and death.

Paul Amato and Jacob Cheadle

Paul Amato and Jacob Cheadle (Journal of Marriage and Family, Feb, 2005) conducted a longitudinal study using telephone interviews with a sample of 2033 married persons over 20 years to investigate whether divorce has any long term effects. 17% of the sample could not be contacted, but 78% gave complete interviews. The sample was representative when compared to the US Census on key variables such as age, race, household size and home ownership. The study examined the effects on divorce across three generations, with the aim of seeing whether divorce had an effect on certain key outcomes, e.g. educational attainment, marital stability of children, psychological well-being. The researchers also aimed to identify whether the long term effects of parental divorce differ for sons and daughters and whether these effects weaken over time.

Key findings were that divorce in the first generation was associated (n.b. it is not a cause) with lower educational attainment levels, more marital discord, and weaker ties with mothers and fathers in the third generation. There was no evidence of differences in effect dependent upon gender, nor did the effects of divorce become weaker over time. Amato thus concludes that the consequences of divorce can be serious and persist over time, to the extent of having effects for subsequent generations. There is then, a transmission of disadvantage across the generations.

Jekielek (1988)

Jekielek (1998) supports the idea that family discord is more damaging than a matter of reordering. Responses from 1,640 children aged 6 to 14 in the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (USA) were analysed, and indications of anxiety and depression were compared intact without discord families, intact with discord families and reordered families. Children in both reordered and discordant families showed significantly more signs of anxiety and depression than those in intact families with discord; however children who remained in families suffering high levels of discord displayed the highest level of anxiety and depression.

As for a conclusion - well, I’ll leave that up to you. Hopefully you will get some ideas from this how to freshen up your knowledge and understanding of divorce, but one clue for evaluation is to go down the methods route - think about validity, representativeness, sample size and so on.