Date of Award

Spring 5-6-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science (BS)

Department

Psychology

College

College of Science

First Advisor

Andrew M Terranova

Abstract/Description

Divorce is a prevalent issue in the United States, even though research suggests that a healthy marriage is beneficial to children’s development and well-being (Ribar, 2015). Children having divorced parents (Potter, 2010) and parents in unhappy marriages are associated with more difficulties with the psychological well-being of children (Bannon, et al. 2018). The goal of the present study was to determine whether parental divorce and relationship quality are associated with the marital views, attitudes, and relationships of college students. Participants were asked to complete a series of online survey scales measuring parental relationship status, age of parental divorce (if divorced), parental marriage and current relationship quality (Willoughby et al., 2012), parental conflict (Grych et al., 1992), participant relationship status, participant relationship satisfaction (Funk & Rogge, 2007), and participant marital views (Fuwa, 2014) and attitudes (Stackman, et. al., 2016). It was hypothesized that parental divorce and parental conflict would be linked to less traditional marital views and less favorable marital attitudes, as well as lower relationship satisfaction. There were 106 college students whose survey data was analyzed for this study. A majority of participants were white females, and the average age was 20.11 years old. The main findings of this study were that parental relationship quality had more of an impact on college students than parental marital status. Findings of this study lay grounds for future research, such as longitudinal studies that could provide stronger evidence of causational relationships.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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