Literature Review: Correlation between Divorce and Academic Achievement

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LITERATURE REVIEW FOR HEALTH: RELATIONSHIPS, GENDER and SEXUALITY.

The correlation between divorce and academic achievement is a growing concern for our generation as divorce is now so widely accepted and prevalent. In this essay I am focusing on whether children from divorced, separated or single parent homes are academically disadvantaged as a result of their parents’ circumstances. I predict that from my research I will discover that children of divorced, separated or single parent homes will be less likely to match the academic achievement of their peers from intact homes.

        Essentially, the main views of the reviewed articles are that children from divorced, separated or single parent families are often disadvantaged academically throughout their schooling due to emotional distresses, lower attendance and lower economic support. These disadvantages influence children continuously throughout their schooling influencing them to have an increased high school drop out rate and decreased presence and acceptance for tertiary education.

        Children from divorced, separated or single parent homes have lower attendance, and higher suspension and expulsion rates therefore this reflects their lower grades and academic achievement. “Children from disrupted marriages were over 70 percent more likely than those living with both biological parents to have been expelled or suspended” (Dawson). This is theory is supported by the studies of High School counsellor Barry Ham (2003) who concluded that the lower grades probably reflect the differences in attendance as “the high school seniors from divorced households missed almost 60% more class periods than did those from intact families”. Due to these students missing valuable class time they have been unable to gather sufficient information to successful understand relevant topics and therefore lowered their grades in comparison to students of intact families who attend more classes. Mitchell (1985) found that many parents from her study had mentioned or noticed truancy by their sons only and thought parental separation to be the cause. But none of the custodial parents saw this to be there own fault, rather that it was the fault of the other parent. Ham (2003) found contradictory evidence stating that “for both grades and attendance... females were more greatly impacted negatively by divorce than were males”. This contradiction in evidence can be attributed to the different eras in which information was gathered, with Hams research being more recent.

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In a report by ‘USA Today’ in 2002 researchers of a new study from Ohio State University, theorise that the children to begin with may fall behind academically and then not be able to catch up, or alternatively that once they have fallen behind they lose self-esteem and motivation to continue on. Ham (2003) established that "those students from intact families outperform those students from divorced families across all categories” and that students from intact families maintained grade point averages (GPAs) 11% higher than those of peers from divorced families. A 1993 study by Zill et.al., supports this conjecture as ...

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