Parental Divorce and First-Year Students' Transition to University: The Need to Include Baseline Data and Gender

Abstract

This research examines parental divorce and first-year students' transition to university. Incoming students (N = 2,724) to six diverse universities completed questionnaires in August, before university, and again in November and March. Initial baseline measures indicated that females of divorced parents reported more depressive symptoms than females of intact families, whereas males of divorced parents reported lower levels of perceived stress than those of intact families. These findings remained over the first year. Regarding adjustment to university, males with divorced parents reported the best academic adjustment, and females with divorced parents were most vulnerable regarding personal-emotional adjustment.

Keywords:

• college
• divorce
• emerging adulthood
• freshmen
• gender differences
• university adjustment

Acknowledgments

This research was partially funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant to S. Mark Pancer. The study is part of a multiuniversity longitudinal Transition to University project.

Notes

¹Due to space limitations and no significant findings between students of divorce and the students with intact families, the following variables are not mentioned further: social support (Cutrona, 1984), self-esteem (Rosenberg, 1965), and student–university match (Wintre et al., 2008). We also examined age of divorce and of parents' remarriage, however there were limited findings with regards to both factors. For details please contact the authors.

²A 2 × 2 × 2 analysis of covariance of the SACQ total was conducted, revealing a significant interaction of gender and group, F(1, 1104) = 8.52, p < .01, η _p ² = 0.008, with males with divorced parents reporting comparable adjustment to males with intact families (p > .05), and females with divorced parents reporting lower levels of adjustment than females from intact families (p < .05; Table 3). These analyses are not reported within the results section given that the subscales provide a more detailed explanation of the reported differences.

TABLE 3 November and March Means and Standard Error for Adjustment to University Measures of Students From Intact and Divorced Families by Gender