Interparental Differences of Opinion and Children’s Academic Achievement

Abstract

EMPIRICAL and theoretical investigations in i personality research have repeatedly suggested a relationship between interparental conflict and disturbances in children's mental functioning. Despite the strength of this suggestion, inter parental conflict has been relatively neglected in studies of children's academic achievement. Studies relating family influence to children's academic achievement have suggested that disci pline in the home (4), maternal attitudes (2), and parental warmth or involvement (7) are sig nificantly related to the child's academic achieve ment. Studies emphasizing ego-defensiveness (3) and test anxiety (8) have pointed directly to the ego-threatening aspects of family environ ments as determinants of children's academic success or failure, while studies outside of the area of academic achievement (1, 5, 6) have sug gested a close relationship between interparental conflict and disturbed child behavior. Although occasional, oblique references to fam ily conflict are scattered throughout achievement literature, the relationship between interpar ental conflict and children's academic achieve ment has generally been neglected. The present investigation attempted to tap this relationship through the study of interparental differences of opinion. The use of interparental differences of opinion as the principal dimension of the in vestigation obviated conceptualization difficul ties facing students of family conflict. Because interparental differences of opinion are closely associated with family conflict, it seemed that exploration of this dimension might provide use ful empirical information. Determining the presence or absence of a rela tionship between interparental differences of opinion and children's academic achievement was accomplished in three steps. The first step in volved the construction of a questionnaire de signed to elicit and quantify interparental dif ferences of opinion. The second step required grouping offspring into three groups, the low, medium, and high parental differences of opin ion groups on the basis of their parents' differ| ence scores on the questionnaire. The third step consisted of a statistical comparison of the scores of the offspring in the respective groups on three r teria of academic achievement: IQ, reading, and arithmetic. The following null hypotheses were tested in the investigation: 1) that there would be no sig nificant differences among children in the low, medium, and high parental differences of opin ion groups in IQ, reading, and arithmetic; 2) that there would be no significant differences among boys in the low, medium, and high parental dif f r nces of opinion groups in IQ reading, and arithmetic; and 3) that there would be no sig nificant differences among girls in the low, me dium, and high parental differences of opinion groups in IQ, reading, and arithmetic.