By LAURA TESTER
Advocate staff
A researcher from Montreal is welcoming Central Albertans to get involved in a study she is doing on the impacts of divorce on children.
Vikki Stark, director of the Sedona Counselling Centre and a family therapist, is doing a study of the impact on children of how they learned about their parents’ divorce.
Participants can be adults who were children when their parents were divorced. Children or teens can also participate, but will need their parents’ approval.
Visit http://SurveyMonkey.com/s/ChildDivorceStudy to access the questionnaire online.
“This is a very important study because it’s about that moment at which a child or teen finds out that his parents are getting a divorce,” said Stark.
“And from that moment, his life changes on a dime. So often, people’s lives are divided in half — before my parents’ divorce and after my parents’ divorce.”
This is the third such study that Stark has done — the first one was on sister relationships, the other on runaway husbands. Each one of these studies involved 400 participants worldwide. Books were developed from these studies.
Stark hopes to get about 200 participants worldwide for the one on divorce.
She welcomes as many Central Albertans to take part by Feb. 1, 2012.
The plan is to finish the study by next summer and then create a book for parents, so they can learn how to talk about their pending divorce to their children.
Stark anticipates the online questionnaire will take between 10 and 20 minutes.
Anyone who has questions can email Stark at childdivorcestudy@gmail.com
ltester@www.reddeeradvocate.com