Is One Hour Enough? Evaluating Utah’s Online Divorce Education Course Based on Course Length Satisfaction

Randomized controlled trial study of the effects of an online divorce platform on anxiety, depression, and somatization.

“…However, we believe that the effectiveness of the CAD intervention platform in reducing anxious, depressive, and somatization symptoms among divorcees could be due to some of the previously proposed advantages of digital solutions reviewed in the Introduction. Specifically, by being a digital platform, members of the intervention group could access the content repeatedly and ondemand at their convenience, which could have increased usage of, satisfaction with, and exposure to the intervention material (Andersson et al, 2019;Dennis & Ebata, 2005;Turner et al, DIGITAL DIVORCE INTERVENTION AND MENTAL HEALTH 22 2019). Further, participants could tailor their usage to their individual needs which may prove key in successful online divorce interventions as divorcees' needs may differ or change substantially during their first year post-divorce (Kołodziej-Zaleska & Przybyła-Basista, 2016;Malgaroli et al, 2017;Symoens, Bastaits, Mortelmans, & Bracke, 2013).…”

“…Because of easy and cheap access to the Internet and technological developments in the mobile industry (e.g., smartphones and tablets) over the past decade, some of these divorce education programs have expanded their face-to-face classes into online versions (see also Bowers et al, 2011;Turner et al, 2019).…”

Common Practices for Divorce Education

“…Some online divorce education programs are relatively short, but preliminary studies have shown short programs can have a positive impact. For example, less than 1% of participants in Utah's 1‐hour online divorce education course (the length was determined by legislation) indicate that the course is too short (Turner et al, 2020). Conversely, roughly 20% indicated they felt the 1‐hour course was too long; admittedly, however, many of these responses may have be due to general negativity surrounding the divorce process and resentment about having to complete a mandatory course.…”

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

“…The treatment effects of the CAD solution may obviously be explained by the effectiveness of the solution itself; specifically, the decision to allow for heterogeneous user experiences and interactions by letting divorcees tailor their intervention usage and experience to their own needs as this may improve perceptions of content relevance, user satisfaction, and user engagement (e.g. Andersson et al., 2019; Turner et al., 2019). However, treatment effects may also have been accelerated by the fact that the intervention was given to divorcees who on average had little or no separation time prior to their juridical divorce.…”

“…In more recent years, there has been an increased focus on delivering help to divorcees via online interventions due to the potential increased convenience, affordability, cost reductions, scalability, personalisation, reduced stigmatisation, and self‐monitoring of progress of online interventions over more traditional face‐to‐face interventions (Andersson et al., 2019; Bowers et al., 2011; Turner et al., 2019). One core challenge related to online divorce interventions is the lack of rigorous testing of their effectiveness (Bowers et al., 2011).…”