Gordon E Finley

Florida International University | FIU · Department of Psychology

This study evaluated the extent to which divorce creates the “divided world of the child,” as well as consequences of this “divided world” for long-term adjustment. An ethnically diverse sample of 1,375 young-adult university students completed retrospective measures of parental nurturance and involvement, and current measures of psychosocial adjus...

This study provides preliminary psychometric data for two fathering measures, the exist-ing Nurturant Fathering Scale and the newly developed Father Involvement Scale. Both measures are completed from the adolescent or adult child's retrospective point of view. The Nurturant Fathering Scale assesses the affective quality of fathering that young peo...

Any reviewer of the extensive literature on divorce quickly would note that it consists mostly of the voices or concerns of the mothers of divorce, to the neglect of the voices and concerns of the children and fathers of divorce. A growing literature finally is beginning to emerge that gives voice to the children of divorce (Fabricius, Braver, Diaz...

Stay-at-home fathers has become a critically important topic because of reversals in the traditional male dominance in education, occupation, and income. Given the increasing prevalence of women in higher education and in higher status occupations, and their increased earnings, especially in the younger generation, the traditional assignment of mal...

In Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, Elizabeth Marquardt has made a seminal contribution to the divorce literature. She has challenged virtually everything that both lay and expert adult opinion cherishes about divorce. She has driven a stake into the heart of the ideological presumptions that have dominated the divorce li...

Alimony issues are among the most contentious in family dissolution. As of 2015 there are alimony law reform proposals before most US state legislatures that still continue to have alimony laws, particularly permanent alimony laws. However, progress in this area has been slow, in part because of the virtual absence of sound social science research...

Schwartz, S. J., & Finley, G. E. (2013). Effects of divorce on adult children. In R. E. Emery (Ed.), Cultural Sociology of Divorce: An Encyclopedia, Volume 1, pp. 23 – 27. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

This study is an exploration of the relationship between retrospectively perceived desired parental involvement and current troubled ruminations about fathers and mothers by young adults. It investigates the impact of family form on desired parental involvement and subsequently on troubled ruminations. The results show a positive correlation betwee...

This entry focuses on divorce within the conceptual frameworks of family systems theory and the emotional losses engendered when family members part. Emotional loss occurs as the extended family system is divided by divorce into multiple and separate family systems, each characterized by the loss of contact and relationships with members of the ori...

Historically, there have been many twists and turns in views of divorce both by society and by individuals. Historically, writings tended to view the mother as the family member who suffered the greatest negative consequences. More recent research, by contrast, has found that it is more accurate to describe the father-child relationship as sufferin...

In the context of this encyclopedia, asynchronous development between partners contains two hidden assumptions that must be made explicit at the outset: (1) asynchrony is presumed to exacerbate stress that in turn is known to serve as a generalized risk factor for a host of medical, social, and emotional illnesses; and (2) asynchronous development...

One index of the long-term consequences of divorce is troubled ruminations about parents. Our findings show that emerging adults, and especially children of divorce, have higher levels of troubled ruminations about their fathers than their mothers. Possibly related social concerns include cohabitation, non-marital childbearing, and support for agin...

This study was designed to introduce the construct of troubled ruminations about parents and to develop a brief screening instrument. An ethnically diverse sample of 1,376 university students completed the instrument and other measures of psychosocial functioning. Troubled ruminations about mothers and fathers were related to self‐esteem, life sati...

ABSTRACT Using Perceived Parental Acceptance‐Rejection Theory (PARTheory), the relationship between perceived paternal nurturing and involvement and psychosocial developmental outcomes in 202 college‐aged African American and Caribbean American young adults were assessed. All dimensions of paternal nurturing and involvement were positively related...

Reviews the book, Sport, Beer, and Gender: Promotional Culture and Contemporary Social Life edited by Lawrence A. Wenner and Steven J. Jackson (see record 2009-04411-000 ). This edited volume seeks to present a wide range of perspectives at the intersection of sport, beer, gender, promotional culture (beer advertising), and contemporary social life...

The present study investigated the extent to which young adults' reports of—and desires for—maternal and paternal involvement differed between intact and divorced families. An ethnically diverse sample of 1,376 young adults completed measures of reported and desired mothering and fathering across 20 parenting domains. Results indicated that both re...

The present study investigated the association of perceived parenting with health-risk behaviors in an ethnically diverse sample of 1,728 college-attending emerging adults. Participants completed retrospective measures of perceived maternal and paternal nurturance, connection, psychological control, and disrespect and reported their frequency of bi...

This study was designed to compare the factor structures and means for mothering and fathering, as retrospectively perceived by young adult children. Three dimensions of perceived parenting were examined: nurturance, reported involvement, and desired involvement. We used the existing Nurturant Fathering and Father Involvement Scales, and the newly...

The present study investigated the relationship between retrospectively reported father involvement and current reports of psychosocial outcomes in an ethnically diverse sample of 1,989 young adults. Outcomes included subjective well-being, which has been traditionally used as an outcome of divorce, and desires for more or less father involvement,...

Divorce: Causes and Consequences has received a number of rave reviews. At last check, there were 3 on the dust jacket and 42 on Amazon.com with an average rating of five gold stars, which is “as good as it gets.” So why a review titled “Divorce: The Rest of the Story?” The book is very well written and does a very convincing job. But it omits som...

The purpose of this research is to inquire into the differential growth of selected cognitive processes during the period 6 through 13 years of life, in cultural settings differing in isolation, modernization, and child-rearing practices. ... Tests of recall memory and conservation were administered to children 6 to 13 years of age living in two ne...

The present study was conducted to investigate differences in nurturant father-ing, father involvement, and young adult psychosocial functioning among small samples of three nontraditional family forms. A total of 168 young-adult university students from three family forms (27 adoptive, 22 adoptive step-father, 119 nonadoptive stepfather) completed...

In the mid-20th century, Parsons and Bales characterized the fathering role in terms of instrumental functions such as providing income, protecting, and discipline. In the present study the authors investigated the extent to which the fathering role has expanded to include expressive functions. An ethnically diverse sample of 1,989 university stude...

This preliminary research explores the effect that parental nurturance has on two child academic outcome variables: college grade point average and satisfaction with academics. Data collected using the Nurturant Parenting Scale (N=626) was split by gender and family form in order to isolate effects of parental nurturance in both intact and divorced...

Reading a book written by a psychoanalyst is a lot like reading an inkblot—and never is this more true than for an inkblot titled The Good Father: On Men, Masculinity, and Life in the Family. Faithful to truth in advertising, the book covers exactly what the title says it is going to cover and does so extraordinarily well. This book is successful...

The present study was designed to investigate whether ethnicity moderates the effects of divorce on young adults’ retrospective reports of fathering. An ethnically diverse sample of 1,989 university students completed measures of nurturant fathering, reported father involvement, and desired father involvement. Compared with participants from intact...

The present analysis examined die relationships of the child's age at the time of divorce, the number of years elapsed since the divorce, and postdivorce coresidence with the father on retrospective reports of paternal nurturance and involvement in an ethnically diverse sample of 497 young adults from divorced families. Results indicated that parti...

One measure of a social movement’s success is a paradigm shift from a traditional paradigm -- which provided the impetus for the movement -- to the achievement of the movement’s goals and the establishment of a new social and legal paradigm. While paradigms can exist at many levels, we will focus on three: empirical research, public attitudes, and...

Using a multimeasure approach, the current study investigated 12 indices of academic, familial, psychological, and health outcomes for 4 groups of transracial and same-race adopted adolescents. A secondary analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health data showed that Asian adolescents adopted by White parents had both the highes...

Exploring how rising family dissolutions affect adopted children, the authors investigated 2 competing viewpoints: (a) a double jeopardy hypothesis, positing adoptees are susceptible to heightened risks of adjustment problems because of a compounding of parental losses, versus (b) a buffering hypothesis, suggesting early birth parent losses buffer...

The current study investigated group differences in adolescent adjustment by adoption status and adoption subtype in a national sample, in contrast to group differences based on developmental stage or gender. Secondary analyses of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health were performed to describe group differences in a broad range of a...

Beginning in the 1960’s, national concern arose regarding a perceived crisis of child abuse and neglect. Beginning in the 1980’s, a counter-concern also arose regarding a perceived crisis of large numbers of unfounded and false abuse allegations along with the inherently negative consequences of these investigations for children and parents. This p...

Although the traditional focus in socialization research has been on the effect of parents on their children (Finley, 1999), recently, researchers have turned their attention to the effects of children on their parents (Ambert, 1992; Demick, Bursik, & Dibiase, 1993). An important confound in the study of the effects of children on parents, however,...

... Open adoption and transracial adoption have been among the most fiercely debated adoption issues over the past few decades and, in all likelihood, will continue to be fiercely debated given all the political agenda, ideological, legal, policy, and research positions that have been advanced on all sides. The research positions, unfortunately, ap...

In my final Editorial, I would like to begin with a most heartfelt thanks to the authors who have submitted manuscripts for review to Adoption Quarterly, to the Editorial Board who went well above and beyond the call of duty to generously, kindly, and thoughtfully critically evaluate the manuscripts send to them ... In this editorial, I briefly dis...

A secondary analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), Wave I, In-Home Adolescent Interview data set for adolescents of intact families found that: (a) adoptees reported feeling significantly closer to their fathers while biological adolescents reported feeling significantly closer to their mothers; (b) there wer...

... Like many issues of social policy, this is a value-decision issue. Combining the transracial adoption literature with the foster care literature exposes a sincere problem that requires a solution. Accordingly, attention to this situation may contribute to refining this value-decision for those working with child placements. Essentially, while s...

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 2002, Vol 47(5), 629-631. Reviews the book "Abandoned Children" edited by Catherine Panter-Brick and Malcolm T. Smith (see record 2000-00900-000). The leitmotifs of this review are (a) "Abandoned Children" is an extremely thought-provoking book; (b) the judicial and administrat...

... we will be critiquing legislation as a form of social intervention. The focus will be on intended as well as unintended consequences of interventions, good and bad means of implementing interventions, and the inherently unresolvable issue of: Whose rights prevail? ... Clearly, legislation which enhances birth father rights is laudable give that...

... At core, the issue is: who decided what is in "the best interest of the child" (Finley,2002). In abuse and neglect, we further are dealing with the issues of the well-being of children and which of society's most fundamental social institutions holds the ultimate rights and responsibilities for the well-being of children: the family or the stat...

... In August 1999 Hal Grotevant and Manfred van Dulmen hosted an International Conference on Adoption Research at the University of Minnesota. Much was learned on many fronts. As the conference progressed, however, what became increasingly clear was the striking ethnocentricity of adoption research, practice, and policy and the consequent realizat...

The losses involved in the adoption experience commonly have been conceptualized as a risk factor for a variety of adverse psychological, social emotional, and behavioral out comes for all members of the adoptive triad. ... [will] the risk factor of adoption interact in an additive or multiplicative fashion with the risk factor of divorce to magnif...

Often absent from scholarly, legislative, and divorce court debates on fathers and “the best interests of the child” are the voices of children themselves. The present report seeks to give expression to children’s voices regarding the domains of their lives where children wanted their fathers to have been more involved than they actually were. Retr...

This secondary analysis of a behavior genetic data set examines possible relationships between the age of the adoptive father and adoptive mother at the time of adoption and patterns of psychopathology in their young adult adoptees. Importantly, if relationships are found, they are free of genetic confounds between parents and children. Most broadl...

Today, virtually all adoption reviews begin with a sentence like: “The landscape of adoption has changed radically over the past several decades.” And, this certainly is true. Depending on the historical starting point, one finds both linear and curvilinear trends over time. However, as one approaches the present, what one finds are many divergent...

Two hundred and three male and 164 female adult adoptees were interviewed to see whether or not their infant temperament as retrospectively rated by their adoptive parents would correlate with their adult anti-social behavioral outcomes. The study found that infants who were retrospectively described by their parents as: 1). difficult. 2). spit out...

This chapter focuses on children of adoptive families. The chapter is divided into 3 sections. The 1st section critically evaluates the widely published epidemiological view that adoptees have elevated rates of psychopathology and contrasts it with the traditional view that adoption is a successful intervention into the lives of abandoned children....

ABSTRACT: This chapter focuses on children of adoptive families. The chapter is divided into 3 sections. The 1st section critically evaluates the widely published epidemiological view that adoptees have elevated rates of psychopathology and contrasts it with the traditional view that adoption is a successful intervention into the lives of abandoned...

Adoptive fathers were mailed an anonymous questionnaire which included an open-ended question on adoptive fatherhood and the adoption process. Recent first-time adoptive fathers were extraordinarily positive about their experiences and feelings as adoptive fathers. In sharp contrast, they were overwhelmingly negative about the adoption process. The...

The silent confounds of the Main Effects Model as used in adoption research are individual difference driven self-selection and choice along with intermediary and birthparent selections. Two Chain-of-Choices Models -one for adoptive parents and one for birthparents and adoptees -are presented as possible frameworks within which to consider the role...

The present review critically evaluates evidence from adoption studies on the heritability of antisocial personality, interactions between genetic predispositions and the characteristics of adoptive mothers and fathers, and both the methodological and diagnostic shortcomings of existing studies. The article concludes with directions and suggestions...

Does the age of a father or a mother at the birth of a child influence the child's perception of the father's or the mother's level of acceptance or rejection? This question arises in the context of earlier work by Daniels and Weingarten (1982) and recent literature (Garrison, Blalock, Zarski, & Merritt, 1997; Parke, 1995) suggesting a preponderanc...

Examined the relationship between the frequency of father contact in childhood and adolescence, and perceptions of fathers' affective quality of parenting. Anonymous questionnaires were administered to 1,072 high school students (aged 13–19 yrs) from 3 ethnic groups: African, East Indian, and Mixed. Ss with higher father contact as children (Father...

... when the technological level is extended downward to the most primitive hunting, gathering, and fishing societies, a curvilinear relationship between modernization and the treatment of the aged emerges. In hunting, fishing, and collecting societies, and aged appear to enjoy a high status, but their survival may be precarious. In stable agrarian...

A questionnaire and a checklist were used to obtain self-reports of the retrieval strategies used by older and younger adults for 2 of the earliest and most common memory complaints. 31 elderly volunteers (aged 66–86 yrs) and 49 undergraduates were asked what they did to remember names and find misplaced objects in everyday life. Although the check...

In this article we review the literature on memory in middle‐aged adults, focusing on the place of memory in development from young adulthood through old age. We examine the areas of free recall, cued recall, recognition, and prose recall as well as the issues of automaticity and strategy use. The overall findings reveal a steady decline in memory...

Elderly subjects were presented with name questions from the popular game of Trivial Pursuit to induce tip‐of‐the‐tongue (TOT) states. TOT states occur when one knows that one knows a name but cannot retrieve it immediately. TOT name states are a major memory complaint of the elderly. When in a TOT state, subjects were encouraged to search for the...

Interviews were conducted with elderly residents of an area targeted for massive redevelopment. Social support was considered simultaneously with health and personal control beliefs in relation to well-being, and the unresolved issue of the sufficiency of one support figure was explored. Health, control, and support each emerged as independent pred...

The structure of social support and its relation to health, affect, and life satisfaction are compared for two samples of the elderly. The first is a national representative sample; the second is a distressed sample from South Miami Beach. Although there are similarities in the structure of social support across the two groups, those in the Miami B...

Previous research with United States samples suggests that birth order findings in the area of interpersonal behavior can best be conceptualized in terms of the firstborn S's stronger need to make social comparisons. The model of Ring et al. hypothesizes that the salience of social comparisons for firstborns suggests they will differ from later-bor...

... the common enticements of retirement abroad (climate, cost, and geographic beauty) have little to do with the local inhabitants who blend with the scenery rather than serve as central characters in the drama of retired life abroad. ... it also appears that when one chooses one's retirement eden, one does so with the implicit understanding, if n...

... when the technological level is extended downward to the most primitive hunting, gathering, and fishing societies, a curvilinear relationship between modernization and the treatment of the aged emerges. In hunting, fishing, and collecting societies, and aged appear to enjoy a high status, but their survival may be precarious. In stable agrarian...

ABSTRACT: Presents a review of recent research and interpretations on the psychology of aging. Major topics include intelligence, memory, learning, personality, psychopathology, cross-cultural research, and methodological issues. Topics briefly noted include behavior genetics, nutrition, motivation, retirement, stress, and education. (45 ref) (Psyc...

The 5th Annual Conference of the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research (SIETAR), in Mexico City, was evaluated using both scaled and open-ended questions. Analysis of the scaled responses suggested that the participants found the conference to be personally enjoyable, professionally worthwhile, well organized and intellectually...