Ingles

How it affects the stress of divorce and childcare.

This is a quantitative and qualitative study. An interdisciplinary approach, which links the knowledge of health sciences and human sciences, is used to analyze the phenomenon in order to verify how psychosocial aspects impact the physical, mental and emotional health of people.

Stress occurs when cognitive assessment concerning a given situation demands personal resources from an individual beyond those s/he is able to access to deal with that context. An assessment is the personal meaning (beliefs, values, objectives) one assigns to an event.

It has been made a study with 78 adults in situations of divorce and child custody in the Public Defender’s Office of Sergipe, Brazil in order to verify the occurrence of stress symptoms. The application of the Stress Symptoms Inventory, validated by Lipp, revealed that 71.8% of the participants experienced stress, and 51.8% of these were in the resistance phase and 82.1% predominantly presented psychological symptoms.

Participants

A total of 78 adults (49 women and 29 men) composed a convenience sample. These individuals voluntarily consented to participate in the study and signed free and informed consent forms.

Procedures

One professional and two students from the field of Psychology applied the instruments and stayed at the data collection site for three weeks.

Socio-demographic data included gender, occupation, profession, income, and education: data regarding marriage included time living together, main difficulties and coping strategies.

Instruments

Stress Symptoms Inventory

Semi-structured interview

Simple descriptive analysis (frequency, average, standard deviation) was used to analyze SSI and socio-demographic data.

The Chi-square and Fisher’s exact test were used for the analysis of bivariate inference. Statistical significance was verified between the dependent variable “stress symptoms” and independent variables (socio-demographic variables, marriage and divorce aspects).

The results also show that there is a lack of preventive measures, such as marital education programs, to prevent e serious relational problems that harm the mental and somatic health of those involved and that impede the healthy exercise of parenthood, essential for the development of children, according to the observations of Wagner and Mosmann.