Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Children of Divorce

CBMW has published commentary on an article that they do not link to. Sigh. This is their general pattern. Here is the study and on page 37 it states,

    Amato and Keith (1991) summarised the results of over 90 studies and showed that children with divorced parents “on average” are worse off than those with continuously married parents. These children tend to have less academic success, they exhibit more conduct problems, are more likely to suffer depression and distress, have lower self esteem, tend to have fewer friends and less social support from their peers and also have weaker emotional bonds with their mothers and fathers
And here is a review of the Amato and Keith study,

    Amato, P. R., & Keith, B. (1991). Parental divorce and the well-being of children: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 110, 26-46.Meta-analysis involved 92 studies that compared children living in divorced single-parent families with children living in continuously intact families on measures of well-being. Children of divorce scored lower than children in intact families across a variety of outcomes, with the median effect size being 14 of a standard deviation. For some outcomes, methodologically sophisticated studies yielded weaker effect sizes than did other studies. In addition, for some outcomes, more recent studies yielded weaker effect sizes than did studies carried out during earlier decades. Some support was found for theoretical perspectives emphasizing parental absence and economic disadvantage, but the most consistent support was found for a family conflict perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record. Copyright © 2005 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

don't have time to pull the research, but the one time children do better after a divorce is when it is a highly conflictual marriage/abusive marriage. What this report does not say is that children who grow up in homes where they witness violence are 348% more likely to become abusive towards their partners. Always frustrating when people pull what they want from reearch and neglect the rest.

Anonymous said...

It is not clear to me this is the same study. Why do you think it is?

Don Johnson

Anonymous said...

researcher bias. They will often pull out what proves their point.

Anonymous said...

It is not clear to me that what Sue found is the same study that CBMW used. I agree CBMW has bias in this area.

Don Johnson