Reconciling Mixed Findings on Children’s Adjustment Following High-Conflict Divorce

Despite important advances, empirical evidence regarding the impact of divorce on children is mixed, ranging widely in its conclusions regarding the intensity, chronicity, and harmfulness of parental divorce on their post-divorce adjustment. To explain the broad range of findings, we suggest that successful and dysfunctional adjustment following parental divorce may not be mutually exclusive. Rather, they may be partly independent, and children may report divorce-specific traumatic feelings as well as a relatively high post-divorce adjustment. We examined these suggestions in a sample of 142 six-to-18-year-old Dutch children whose parents were involved in high-conflict divorces. Children completed self-reported measures of post-divorce traumatic impact and adjustment. Consistent with our suggestion, children showed, on average, both high levels of trauma and high levels of post-divorce adjustment. Nevertheless, illustrating domain spill-over, at the individual level, children who experienced more traumatic impact of the divorce also reported lower levels of post-divorce adjustment. These results suggest that high-conflict divorce represents a risk for traumatic impact, and, at the same time, children demonstrate resilience. Future research examining which children are more susceptible to trauma and/or resilience over time would be promising

Compositional and urban form effects on residential property value patterns in Greater London

The objective of this research is to determine the role of urban street layout design in the process of shaping property values. The effect of spatial accessibility on rent is a classic finding of spatial economics. Using space syntax fine-grained spatial design analysis, which indexes the spatial centrality and accessibility, the patterns of property prices are analysed for a large contiguous sample of over 60 000 residential dwellings in a North London borough, using the council tax band as a proxy variable for the property price. Few studies have examined the effect of spatial contiguity on the housing sub-market classification. The findings demonstrate that the council tax band proxy is a good indicator of residential property sale prices. In addition, a hedonic model framework shows that spatial centrality and accessibility, as indexed by the space syntax spatial design analysis, accounts for the variations in residential property values for single and multiple dwellings when controlling for the property size, relative density and building age. Multivariate analysis is used to establish the weighting of the different variables. The single most important spatial factor is the property size, followed by the ambient density, the local and global spatial accessibility and the building age. Non-residential land use location, the proximity to main arterial roads and the associated traffic and air pollution are shown to inhibit the residential property location