The project sheds light on the dynamics of intergenerational and sibling relationships in post-divorce families by bringing together and re-analysing data gathered in three studies over an 8 year period. The project will build substantially upon and consolidate the work of the ESRC Enduring Families study which discerned changes in the lives of post-divorce families over a 3-4 year period.
Objectives
- To carry out a meta-analysis of existing qualitative longitudinal (QL) data on 28 post-divorce families, drawing on the different perspectives of family members and their changing accounts over time;
- To contribute substantive findings on the dynamics of intergenerational and sibling relationships in post-divorce families;
- To explore new ways to manipulate and interrogate QL data and thereby to contribute to the development of QL methods.
Methods
The analysis, drawing on longitudinal data from existing data sets, involved several varied and complementary strategies. The existing data sets were initially brought into a common framework for analysis through an extensive recoding of the parent data to bring it into line with the child data. This was then subjected to cross-sectional thematic and longitudinal case study analyses. An interpretive analysis linked the resulting empirical findings with wider evidence about family life and relationships after divorce.
Key findings
The unfolding of parent-child relationships needs to be understood in relation to wider networks of relationships both within and beyond the family. The ability of young people to move on emotionally from parental divorce depends to a large degree on the ability of the parents to move on. This is reflected in the nature of post-divorce arrangements for contact and residence and the ways in which any conflict is managed and harmony is sustained over time. A range of subjective resources - beyond time itself - are found to be important in this respect.
Sibling relationships take on a new significance post-divorce as children will generally spend more of their childhoods with each other than with either of their parents. Such sibling proximity is intensely close and may be volatile through the continual processes of connecting and separating between siblings and parents which is accentuated by the logistics of moving between two households post-divorce.
Siblings are deeply implicated in the ways in which young people create and manage changes or sustain existing practices in their family lives. They play a significant role in mediating parent-child relationships and in the exercise of young people’s agency in moving these relationships on. It seems that siblings provide a benchmark against which young people form their own identities and determine their own behaviour, seeking either to emulate or distance themselves from their sibling.
About the study
The study was undertaken at The University of Leeds under the direction of Dr Bren Neale in the Families, Life Course and Generations Research Centre in the School of Sociology and Social Study.
Other research outputs include seminars on the theme of childhood being and becoming; presentations at practitioner conferences on themes of siblinghood, parent-child relationships and the dynamics of contact and residence; papers on sibling relationships, the dynamics of parent-child relationships and on the process of meta-analysis in QL research. The main output will be a research monograph: "Moving On: The Changing Lives of Young People after Parental Divorce".
Key words
Post-divorce families, Enduring Families, family dynamics, innovations in QL methodology
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