Date of Award
Summer 2017
Rights
Access is available to all users
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS) in Psychology: Clinical
Department
Psychology
Abstract
Divorce is a common phenomenon in the United States that constitutes as a crisis for many families (Esmaeili & Yaacob, 2011; Heatherington, 1979). Kelly (2003) estimates that about 8 to 15 percent of parents continue high conflict anywhere from 2 to 3 years post-divorce. Post-divorce parental conflict has been found to be more important in influencing the functioning of adolescents than parental divorce (Amato, 2001). The purpose of this study is to investigate if adult children will generally tend to join in coalition with a same sex primary custodial parent regardless of their parent’s role in character assassination. Eastern Washington University undergraduate students were recruited from the Psychology department to complete a survey made available to them through SONA Systems Department Recruiting system. Data was analyzed using a paired-sample t-test and an independent-sample t-test. The results indicated that female adult children from divorced families tended to assign significantly more positive attributes to their mothers and more negative attributes to their fathers even though they reported witnessing their mothers engaging in character assassination more often
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Keller, Holly, "IMPACT OF INTER-PARENTAL CHARACTER ASSASSINATION ON CHILDREN POST-DIVORCE" (2017). EWU Masters Thesis Collection. 443.
https://dc.ewu.edu/theses/443
