How Divorce Conflict Relates to an Adult’s Capacity to Build and Maintain Friendships
Siena De Steno, Allison Jones,
& Courtney Hooker
a Research Methods Project supervised by Dr. Hilary Stebbins
(Spring 2021)
Stebbins_Jones_postercheck out these “elevator” talks from some members of the group
The average on your friendship quality measure was only 7, but the measure contained 30 items. If I’m interpreting that correctly, that means your participants, on average, reported really low friendship quality. Right? What do you make of that? How do you think that impacted your study?
Yes! The average score overall for friendships was pretty low. This might be because the friendship measure we used actually looked at 10 different subsections of friendship quality including companionship, intimacy, support, satisfaction, approval, etc. I believe because the measure looked at such a variety of aspects, it led to a lot of variability and ultimately a lower average. If we would have used only certain subsections we may have yielded a higher friendship average. Either way, the literature suggested lower relationship quality would be associated to people who experienced divorce and family conflict– so a lower friendship quality score was not surprising.
Very Interesting! I believe that when children have to live those experiences, has a lot impact on their life.
We’re so glad you found our research interesting! Yes, the literature backs up the idea that these experiences have a strong impact on their life. Though, I would like to highlight that our research did not actually find family conflict to have a significant relationship with friendship quality. So while there is data supporting the belief that divorce can have a strong, negative impact on the lives of children, there is also a growing framework for divorce studies that believes the impact is different depending on the specific familial situation, and our research did not find that their experiences had such a strong impact. Thank you for your comment!
I thought you all did an excellent job on this poster and I like the choice on the topic. I thought the flow of the project was very smooth transitioning from section to section. I also like the discussion section. I thought it was organized an easy to follow. The only recommendation I have is maybe having a small section explaining the results.
I think this presentation is very well organized and you all did a great job overall! I just had one question: were your participants UMW students or did the participants come from other places?
Thank you, we really appreciate that! We pulled most of our participants from the participant pool, but we also were able to collect data from reaching out through social media.
This project was very interesting to me, because I never experienced or lived through a divorce in my childhood. I did not think that having that experience would have that much of an impact on future or current friendships and the quality of them.
Good job on this project! Very interesting idea and lots of inter-related variables that all made a lot of sense to use. Why do you think an external locus of control is related to having poorer friendship quality? Might it be that when we believe our friendships are the result of our own actions that we think they are of higher quality as opposed to judging the quality of a friendship on the actions of our friends?
That is an interesting way of looking at it! I had initially thought of it as the result of feeling less in control over the friendship. If you believe you have less control over the outcome of the friendship, you may put in less effort or engage in behaviors that are less conducive to a good friendship. Many different ways to look at it. Thank you!
Very creative poster! It is very easy to understand, so kudos for that. How do you think that the study would have looked if you had a much lower power?
This was so interesting! I thought family conflict would have a larger influence. What did you make of this as far as in relation to past literature?
This is a very interesting idea and the study was well done. It is unfortunate the study was low-powered but the presentation is easily digested and visually pleasing.
I found this study to be very interesting! I love that you were able to fill in small piece of the gap on divorce studies. I was very shocked that all three factors could not significantly predict quality of friendships. Do you think if it same sex friendships vs. opposite sex friendships would result in different correlations?