Political Science - Milestone Two

1 Milestone Two 2 For my project, I am examining the effects of divorce on children and their experiences of divorce. Through collecting my research, I have learned that the majority of the research I have come across has been either a mixed-method or qualitative study. There are some quantitative studies that I have researched, but they were much harder to find. As far as data collection goes, the collection seems to be majority comprised of questionnaires, surveys, and other longitudinal data collection methods. As an example of my research, an article I have found through Shapiro Library is titled “Self-harm risk between adolescence and midlife in people who experienced separation from one or both parents during childhood” by A. Astrupe et al., examines the association between divorce and self-harm risk in adolescence and midlife. The methodology is mixed in nature as the study examined and categorized qualitative variables such as child-separation status at birth, age at first child-parent separation, and other child-separation exposure classifications in addition to quantitative variables such as statistics and empirical evidence surrounding incidence and prevalence rates of self-harm behaviors (Astrupe et al., 2017). Most of the studies I have researched follow similar structures regarding methodology, often examining both qualitative and quantitative measures, but I believe to see qualitative measures used more often in this specific research project. In psychology, my social science, mixed-method studies are used often as they provide both empirical and contextual evidence and information. Other social sciences tend to be similar, I also researched sociology and cultural anthropology in my educational career and during those classes, I found research does tend to sway to mixed-method studies as they provide the most evidence with context. Mixed-method studies take benefits from both qualitative and quantitative methods to provide solid and wellresearched articles and studies. If one or the other was used more, it would be difficult to provide 3 excellent credibility. For example, if a study is solely quantitative, it can provide contextual information, but lacks any empirical or statistical evidence to support the theory or research problem. Likewise, if quantitative data is solely used, researchers have empirical and statistical evidence, but lack any contextual information to provide a further basis for the evidence. As an example, one of the qualitative research articles I have found titled “Living in Two Worlds – Children’s Experiences After Their Parents’ Divorce – A Qualitative Study” provides a qualitative overview of children’s experiences of living in two homes. The study uses qualitative data collection with a researcher asking participating children questions such as “What makes you feel secure?” and “What makes you feel sad?” in relation to living in the two homes and concluded that children found their worlds “split in two” after separation (Johnsen et al., 2018). The study did not account for quantitative data, though, such as length of time spent at each household or prevalence and occurrence of specific behaviors due to separation, that could have really provided additional evidence to support researcher claims.