Parents’ marital disruption and its uneven effect on children’s academic performance—A simulation model

Although a substantial amount of social science research has examined the consequences of various life events, much less has been done to examine how the effect may be unevenly distributed. The present research takes children’s experiences of parents’ marital disruption as an example and demonstrates how a contaminated-distribution model may simulate a scenario in which the effect of parents’ marital disruption on children’s academic performance is unevenly distributed. Using test performance data from a nationally representative sample of 10,045 American adolescents, the study partitions the overall performance distribution among adolescents of divorce into an unaffected and a severe-effect distribution. The analyses report the estimated proportions of adolescents whose academic performance is severely affected by various levels. The findings also show that the proportions of adolescents whose school performance is affected by a fixed level remain relatively stable in three consecutive post-divorce waves.