Psychology

Divorce between parents has diverse effects on the children and this have immediate as well as long lasting consequences. Studies show that before reaching the age of 18, more than a third of American children go through the trauma of having their parents divorce. It has become a very common occurrence in the American society because studies show that there are more than a million divorces per annum. There are several factors that determine how diverse the negative effects would be on the children going through the divorce of their parents (Barsky 2000). The age of the child, the sex of the child, the amount of quarrels within the family and the cooperation of the family members are factors that contribute to the psychological health and the ability or inability of the child to perform in school. Universally, children who have had an experience in family dissolution are known to have more difficulties in academics and in their social lives. This is in comparison with children who are from stable and well established families even if the parent is a single parent (Capuzzi  Gross 2001).

Children are different and there is bound to be variability in their reactions some would experience few negative effects and some would show resilience in adjusting to those effects of the divorce of the parents. Those who experience intense effects end up carrying them into their own adult life and have impairment when it comes to developing and maintaining a long-lasting relationship. The treatment of the affective, cognitive in addition to the behavioral cost of a divorce at the community agency can extend across the scale of primary, secondary as well as tertiary intervention. Primary interventions are used to assist the children cope and understand divorce as common crisis of life. The secondary interventions provide services to the children who are already at risk of the negative effects. Tertiary interventions are the children already suffering from psychological and social impairments (Dykeman 2003).

The experiment and purpose of the study
Pre-referral intervention is habitually recognized as a workable treatment alternative. This is when the children are experiencing adjustment issues as the predecessor of the problem behavior. There were test done to show the resulting effects of a pre-referral tertiary-intervention program in reducing certain behavior in the children. The program included taking a sample of children who are in families going through divorce and there respective custodial parent. They met the counselor every week for about one and one-half hours (Barsky 2000). The length of treatment was set at three months. In this study, 6 such family sets were seen in 1998-99 during 1999-2000 there were 8 family sets and seven in 2000-2001. The statistics show that fifteen out of the twenty one children and their custodial parents went through and finished the treatment inclusive of the follow-up. The sample had 13 males and 2 female students these included four Hispanics, eight Caucasians and three Afro-Americans. The age of an average student participating in this program was 13.1 years (standard deviation  5.8 months). There was a Conflict Tactic Scale at the beginning of the treatment and another after the six months so the study gave pre and post results (Barsky 2000).

Using a two-tailed paired sample t-test which is a statistical formulae and the alpha level being 0.05, the results indicated that there was significant development in the students reported use of verbal reasoning after taking the program. The t value  4.294 while the p-value used was  0.01.There was also a significant decline in the students reported application of verbal aggression. In this test the t-value  3.623 while the p-value used was  0.01. An average child who was presented for treatment was reported to have the use of reason 3.00 times (standard deviation  1.85) during the six months before the treatment. The figures change slightly to 4.20 times (standard deviation  1.26) during the six months that came after the treatment. Average children presented for the treatments were said to have verbal aggression 4.87 times (standard deviation  0.84) in the six months before the treatment and the same average child had 3.87 times (standard deviation  1.41) during the six months that came after the treatment. There were no significant treatment effects that were reported for physical aggression as the t-value was 1.702 and the p-value was 0.111. For an average child who was presented for treatment, there were reports of use of physical aggression 1.73 times (standard deviation  0.88) in the six months before the treatment and 1.33 times (standard deviation  0.90) in the six months after the treatment also known as the follow up months (Dykeman 2003).

Conclusion
There are few limitations in this test the sample size is very small to use that data as an assumption of how all the children under that treatment would react. There are no reports of any outliers in this treatment which should be there because in every situation there are extremes. According to the results that the teachers reported a typical student finished the treatment in 2.13 months (standard deviation  0.74).  Results show that pre-referral intervention could reduce the number of children or students who are placed in special education programs due to misbehavior. These results boost the importance of the community agency counselor because they seem to play a critical role in schools. They help students deal with issues that obstruct their education especially when those issues relate to divorce of their parents. The results from this particular study advocate for the unique role of the conflict theory in the treatment of the effects of divorce in response to school behavior. There should be increase in the use of rational problem solving in attempt to deal with conflicts. It encourages fewer incidents of aggression that is verbal when both parent and children are at home. Acting-out behavior in children while at school also decreases when the treatment is under gone fully (Dykeman 2003).