Cooperation after Divorce: An RCT Study of the Effects of a Digital Intervention Platform on Self-Perceived Stress

Abstract

In most industrialized societies, including Denmark where the current study was conducted, the divorce rate exceeds 40% (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2016; European Commission, 2015; Statistics Denmark, 2017). Divorce has consistently been found to be among the most stressful life events and is often perceived as a prolonged stressful situation by divorcees (

A Randomised Controlled Trial Study of the Effects of a Digital Divorce Platform on Mental and Physical Health

“…The decline may be due to an adverse time effect of mental health on physical health whereby reduced mental health increasingly adversely affects physical health over time. In this regard, although we found that mental health increased over time in our study in the control group also, mental health more generally has still consistently been found to be poorer among divorcees than comparable norm groups both immediately following divorce and at 1-year assessments from baseline (see also Cipric et al, 2020;Hald et al, 2020). While we find little reason to think that this may be different in the current study, we encourage future studies in the area to allow for designs investigating this hypothesis.…”

“…Given that other papers have reported CAD program effects on outcomes such as stress, anxiety, depression, somatisation, and hostility (Cipric et al, 2020Øverup et al, 2020), the current findings further speak to the breadth of the effects of the CAD program and highlight its potential public health significance. Importantly, the results for mental health in this study are on par with those previously reported for more specific mental health outcomes such as depression or anxiety (Hald et al, 2020).…”

“…Further, when these more specific mental health outcomes were controlled for in this study, the treatment effects for mental health were still evident. This indicates that the treatment effects of the CAD solution on general mental health may not merely be driven by some of its subdomains such as depression, anxiety, or stress (Cipric et al., 2020, Hald et al., 2020). Moreover, the finding of treatment effects on physical health corroborates previous findings of treatment effects of the CAD solution on somatisation although the treatment effect size for general physical health in this study was smaller than that previously found for somatisation (see also Hald et al., 2020).…”

“…The outcome measures included health‐related quality of life, mental and physical health, perceived stress, anxiety, depression, hostility, somatisation, parent reports of children's health‐related quality of life, sick days, and days of absence from work. The evaluation of the effectiveness of the intervention on the outcomes of perceived stress (Cipric et al., 2020), anxiety, depression, and somatisation (Hald et al., 2020), hostility (Øverup et al., 2020), children's health‐related quality of life, and sick days are reported in separate papers following study protocol.…”

When Love Hurts – Mental and Physical Health Among Recently Divorced Danes

“…Second, most countries in the world require separation periods before juridical divorce is granted. This means that divorce studies able to employ "real-time" research are scarce and there has been a call for such studies (e.g., Thuen, 2001;Cipric et al, 2020). The concept of "real-time" research usually refers to the collection of data among divorcees with little or no separation periods before formal juridical divorce (Hald et al, 2020a).…”