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Typologies of Post-divorce Coparenting and Parental Well-Being, Parenting Quality and Children’s Psychological Adjustment

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Abstract

The aim of this study was to identify post-divorce coparenting profiles and examine whether these profiles differentiate between levels of parents’ well-being, parenting practices, and children’s psychological problems. Cluster analysis was conducted with Portuguese heterosexual divorced parents (N = 314) to yield distinct post-divorce coparenting patterns. Clusters were based on parents’ self-reported coparenting relationship assessed along four dimensions: agreement, exposure to conflict, undermining/support, and division of labor. A three cluster solution was found and replicated. Parents in the high-conflict coparenting group exhibited significantly lower life satisfaction, as well as significantly higher divorce-related negative affect and inconsistent parenting than parents in undermining and cooperative coparenting clusters. The cooperative coparenting group reported higher levels of positive family functioning and lower externalizing and internalizing problems in their children. These results suggested that a positive coparenting alliance may be a protective factor for individual and family outcomes after parental divorce.

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Notes

  1. Original CRS-Brief also entails an additional subscale labeled as ‘Coparenting Closeness’. Items of this subscale were not included in this study since they do no assess any coparenting component of the Feinberg’s ecological model [14] and they are not applicable to divorced coparents either.

  2. Since age differences may be expected, we divided the overall sample into two subsamples based on children’s age: 4-10 years subsample (N = 96) and 11-16 year-old subsample (N = 218). After running the three-cluster solution separately on the two subsamples, all significant and non-significant results found on both subsamples replicated those obtained in the overall sample in the associations between coparenting profiles and the outcomes variables (parents’ psychological adjustment, parenting, family functioning, and children’s psychological adjustment).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Psychology, Education & Sports, Lusófona University of Porto, Rua Augusto Rosa 24, 4000-098, Porto, Portugal

    Diogo Lamela

  2. School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Bárbara Figueiredo

  3. School of Education, Polytechnic Institute of Viana do Castelo, Viana do Castelo, Portugal

    Alice Bastos

  4. Prevention Research Center, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Mark Feinberg

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  1. Diogo Lamela
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  2. Bárbara Figueiredo
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  3. Alice Bastos
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  4. Mark Feinberg
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Diogo Lamela.

Appendix: Confirmatory factor analyses of the CRS-Brief [38]

Appendix: Confirmatory factor analyses of the CRS-Brief [38]

CRS-Brief is a recent published measure. Six of the seven subscales that comprised the American version of CRS-Brief were developed to measure the four coparenting components of Feinberg’s model [14]: (1) Coparenting support/undermining component was assessed by three subscales (Coparenting Support, Endorsement of Partner’s Parenting, and Coparenting Undermining); (2) The management of family relationships component was represented by one subscale (Exposure to Conflict); (3) Division of childrearing work component was examined by one subscale (Division of Labor); (4) Coparenting agreement component was assessed with one subscale (Coparenting Agreement). An additional subscale labeled as coparenting closeness was created to examine “the degree to which coparenting enhanced intimacy and strengthened the couple’s relationship” [36, p. 7].

As no Portuguese version of the CRS-Brief is available, items were translated for the current research, using international standard procedures for psychological measures adaptation [43]. As no construct validity study was available in the Portuguese language, a CFA using a maximum likelihood method was conducted to test construct validity of the CRS-Brief in the current sample. Six subscales of the original CRS-Brief were included in the initial CFA. Coparenting closeness subscale was not included in the CFA since this subscale does not measure a coparenting component and is not applicable to divorced coparents.

Initial CFA revealed an adequate fit, CFI = .95, TLI = .92, RMSEA = .08. However, considering the high intercorrelations between Coparenting Agreement, Coparenting Support, and Endorsement Partner’s Parenting subscales (from .60 to .93), two additional concurrent confirmatory models were tested.

Model 2: Items of Coparenting Agreement, Coparenting Support, and Endorsement of Partner’s Parenting subscales were comprised into a single first-order factor in the confirmatory model.

Model 3: A second-order latent factor was created, where these three subscales were conceptualized as intercorrelated first-order factors.

Model 2 revealed poor fit, CFI = .89, TLI = .84, RMSEA = .12. However, Model 3 revealed an excellent fit, CFI = .98, TLI = .97, RMSEA = .04. Comparing Model 3 fit results with those obtained by the original model of the CRS-Brief, Model 3 was found as having a better fit. Therefore, we decided to combine the Coparenting Agreement, Coparenting Support and Endorsement of Partner’s Parenting subscales into the same dimension labeled as Coparenting Agreement/support. Based on these CFA results, this Portuguese version of the CRS-Brief is comprised by four subscales: Coparenting agreement/support, Coparenting Undermining, Division of Labor, and Exposure to Conflict. These CRS-Brief’s subscales were used in the further analyses.

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Lamela, D., Figueiredo, B., Bastos, A. et al. Typologies of Post-divorce Coparenting and Parental Well-Being, Parenting Quality and Children’s Psychological Adjustment. Child Psychiatry Hum Dev 47, 716–728 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-015-0604-5

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