Summary In the study by Nusinovici et al. (2018), the researchers used a quantitative method to assess the impact of divorce or separation of parents on their preterm children’s (preterm meaning born before 35 weeks) academic performance at 5 years of age. Thus, the main variables included in this study were: 1) the subject had to be a preterm baby, 2) the subject’s parents had to be separated or divorced at some point prior to the child’s 5th year (at which point children typically enroll in kindergarten), and 3) and the child had to be in school and able to be assessed by a teacher. The purpose of the study was to see whether there was any correlation between the variables of premature birth, parental divorce or separation, and academic achievement of the child at 5 years of age. The method used was purposive sampling, survey data of “clinical anomalies associated with preterm births” (Nusinovici et al., 2018, p. 2), classification of divorce separation times (2 groups were used—children with parents separated before 36 months, and children with parents separated after 36 months of the child’s birth but before 60 months). Gestational periods also served to classify the subjects, with three groups being determined, ranging from 24 to 27 weeks of gestation on up to 32 to 34 weeks of gestation). To assess the children academically the Global School Adaptation (GSA) questionnaire was given to teachers to assess the subjects and used to assess behavior and academic ability among the subjects. The main findings of the study showed that among preterm children, those who experience a divorce or separation of parents between the ages of 3 and 5 tended to scores a lower GSA and perform academically poorer overall than preterm children whose parents separated or divorced prior to the child turning 3 or whose parents...

The implications of the findings were that preterm children whose parents separate may require more academic and social support in making the adjustment to schooling.
Critique

The sample size of this study was suitably large with over 3,300 babies included in the sample. The longitudinal study monitored these children from 2003 when the births began to be recorded to 2011 when the final year of analysis of academic performance was conducted. The study showed that more than 7000 preterm babies were born between 2003 and 2011 and that more than a thousand of them were excluded from the study because they indicated a lack of adequate neurodevelopment, which would have made them outliers in the study and thrown off the skew. Of the remaining children, 70% of them were evaluated using the GSA. The subjects all came from the LIFT network of maternity wards in the Pays-de-la-Loire region of France. The sample thus provides a suitable size for the study and is defined well enough that the study could be repeated if necessary to verify validity and reliability.

No research model was used in this study as it was exploratory research with an empirical aim—namely to provide quantitative data on the academic abilities of preterm babies at age 5 whose parents had separated or divorced. Because the study was exploratory in nature, it did not have a hypothesis or a research model: the study was descriptive, which was appropriate for the purposes of the study. Were a research model to be used the conceptual model would most likely be appropriate, based on findings of a case study using a similar subject (albeit one with a much smaller sample size, as case studies are not conducive to large samples) from which a degree of generalizeability could be obtained to aid in the construction of the conceptual…