Adolescent mental health and social inequalities related to parental divorce

The number of children who experience parental separation keeps being high in Norway. Parental separation potentially may affect several spheres of students’ lives. However, some adolescents are better adjusted to the divorce than others. To capture heterogeneity in adolescent adjustment to divorce the research aims to compare how negative childhood events moderate the link between parental divorce and different mental health outcomes; and explore the association of parental divorce and the upper secondary school completion.

There is no consistency in the research literature on how parental separation affects school achievements of their adolescents. The results vary from no effects on school achievement up to lower scores that led to school dropout. Nevertheless, there is a lack of studies on the relation of parental divorce and the upper secondary school dropout specifically. One of the planned studies fills this gap by exploring the association between parental divorce and the upper secondary school completion. In addition, potential inequalities that effect school dropout are also analyzed using statistical decomposing techniques that give an opportunity to quantify the contributions to the inequality.

In general, mental health of those adolescents who have experienced parental separation is worse when it is compared to the group of students who do not have their parents separated. The second study aims to get a better understanding on risk and protective factors related to adolescent adjustment to parental separation. In order to achieve this aim the plan is to compare how same negative childhood events moderate the link between parental divorce and different mental health outcomes.

The same source of data is utilized for both studies i.e., adolescent population-based study called Barn I Bergen (youth@hordaland) linked to the National Education Database.

These two studies belong to the “LONGTRENDS” project and are a part of the working package related to “Mental health and social inequality: family, school and community”.