Divorce has no effect on students

A recent study by Warwick researchers has found that the majority of University students whose parents are recently divorced are not negatively affected by the experience.

The research paper, entitled “Are Happiness and Productivity Lower among University Students with Newly-Divorced Parents? An Experimental Approach”, was published earlier this month and written by Dr Eugenio Proto, Dr Daniel Sgroi, and Dr Professor Andrew Oswald.

Participants were tested in arithmetic, followed by a “GMAT-style test designed to help control for intelligence” and a written questionnaire about their family background. In order to avoid any bias, participants were asked to rate their level of general happiness before answering any questions about their parents’ marriage. From the results, the researchers concluded that levels of happiness and academic achievement were not compromised by their parents’ marital status.

The researchers conducted the experiment using 269 Warwick students, all of whom were selected randomly. Fifty-two percent of the participants were male, meaning that potential gender differences were minimised. Dr Daniel Sgroi, one of the three economists involved in the research, told the Boar that “recruitment was handled by two research assistants who were explicitly told to select British students and make sure they had not been involved in a similar experiment before”. The reason for this was because the ‘happiness’ portion of the experiment involved watching a clip of a well-known British comedian, and the researchers did not want results to be affected by potential cultural differences.

Although several academics have investigated this area in the past, this study aimed to approach the subject from a different angle. As the researchers are all from the Department of Economics at Warwick, they stressed in their research paper that:

“We might be interested in the direct question of whether and to what extent parental divorce negatively impacts on children’s ability to perform well in education, and later via their productivity in the workplace, for longrun earnings. At the macroeconomic level, this might even translate into a desire to understand what high divorce rates could do to economic growth through the potential effect on the children of divorced parents.”

While many would express disbelief at the findings of the study, the idea that students are not significantly affected by their parents’ divorce is not unusual. Dr Fiona MacCallum, a professor of Psychology at Warwick, expressed a similar view. Dr MacCallum told the Boar that the findings “are not that surprising in the light of previous research”, as while negative consequences of divorce are apparent in younger children, “this is very often due to family processes rather than family structure per se”.

Dr MacCallum explained that University students would be expected to be less affected than younger children by their parents’ divorce, as they generally spend less time in the parental home. In fact, as found in the study, Dr MacCallum suggested that rather than having an adverse effect, “if divorce leads to a reduction in conflict within the family, it can actually be beneficial for children compared to remaining in high-conflict households.” In addition to this, some of the problems associated with divorce come from a drop in parental income, an issue which MacCallum said was not such an issue for students, as the “majority are likely to come from middle-class homes.”

Despite having commenced the research with the expectation of discovering “harmful consequences from recent parental divorce”, researcher Dr Eugenio Poto concluded that University students on the whole were shown to be far more “resilient” than originally anticipated.

Dr Sgroi of the research team summarised the findings of the study in a statement on Warwick’s Insite intranet, saying that “given the large number of university students throughout the industrialised world who have recently divorced parents, our results can only be reassuring news for concerned parents and students alike”.