This project investigates the immediate and prolonged consequences of recent parental divorce for young adults, aged 18-22. It focuses on consequences in three significant areas of young adults' lives: mental health and psychological adjustment, adult child-parent relations, and life course development (e.g., plans, aspirations and actual transition behaviors such as marriage and school completion). A sample of 800 actual transition behaviors such as marriage and school completion). A sample of 800 young men and women will be interviewed by telephone at two points in the study. One group (n = 400) will have experienced their parents' divorce within the year prior to the first interview; the other group (n = 400) will be from families in which the parents are in an intact first marriage. The first interview will consider relatively immediate effects of parental divorce, and explore factors that differentiate individuals' reactions and adjustment to parental divorce. The second interview, planned for two years later, will consider the extended effects of this family transition in the three areas of interest. The study advances previous research by including a much larger, more diverse sample, an experimental-control group comparison, and a longitudinal component. Thus, it permits a more systematic assessment of both immediate and prolonged effects of recent parental divorce for young adults than any study conducted to date.
