Conclusion + Generalisations
It was concluded, using the evidence gathered throughout this investigation, that students who experienced parental divorce during childhood or adolescence, were more likely to have lower or unidentified academic goals, and score lower on tests such as the SAT. This supports my hypothesis as it supports that having divorced parents would have a negative effect on a child’s academics.
I believe that this conclusion could be generalised, as divorce is something that happens all over the world, not just something that occurs in a specific country or state. This conclusion could apply to a broader population as the family environment in most societies is similar and would therefore be affected similarly by parental divorce.
I would in the future consider paying for full articles that are not available for free or as part of the school’s subscription as there was not a great variety of articles to choose from and compare. However, this also likely has to do with the fact that my research question was overly specific and hard to produce studies on, as observing the effects of children of divorced parents is not something that can be recreated in a lab or purely for research’s sake.
In undertaking this investigation, I was surprised by the lack of research on the effects of parental divorce on children. It is likely that it is just because it is something I have known all my life, not only through myself but also my friends, but divorce seems to me to be a huge area of debate in our modern lifestyle. While the results I found did not surprise me, it was interesting to explore it in more depth and inspect the roles that ethnicity, your parent’s education and their income also play in a student’s academic achievements. I enjoyed being able to choose and freely research a topic that I was interested in instead of having to follow a topic that had been set by the teacher or curriculum; however, I disliked that we were given only one way to present it ( a website ), as I had trouble with working with the format of Weebly and editing the layouts so that I could present my information in a way that flowed and made sense.
Future experiments could include:
The effects of parental divorce on a child’s mental health.
Academic results of students with mental health problems.
Academic results of students with mental illnesses.