Event

The Department of Behavioural Sciences hosts the Student Seminar of PhD degree candidate, Mr. Durwin Clarke, on Wednesday 9^th November, 2011, from 11 am-12 pm, at Criminology Lecture Room B.  

Mr. Clarke will discuss the topic, “The Influence of Religiosity on the Stability and Quality of Indo and Afro Trinidadian’ Consensual Cohabiting Relationships: A Mixed Method Design.” 

Abstract:

The researcher seeks clarification on at least two major aspects of consensual cohabitation dissolution:  (a) By what process is consensual cohabitation dissolved among Indo and Afro Trinidadians?  (b)What are the ways and by what processes do socio-demographic factors mediate cohabitation dissolution?  The mixed methods sequential exploratory design study is conducted in three phases.  The first phase of the study is a qualitative grounded theory exploration of influences on the common-law partnership dissolution.  Focus groups will be conducted with ‘ever lived’ common-law partners form the fourteen administrative districts across the island of Trinidad. Members of the clergy from major religious intuitions, marriage officers and social workers at each administrative district will participate in in-depth individual interviews. A second, instrument development phase, will develop the Common-law Partnership Dissolution Questionnaire (CPDQ), a measurement instrument design with good psychometric properties to test a series of working hypotheses related to the theory generated in the qualitative phase.  In the third phase of the study, the CPDQ will be used to collect data from a larger sample of ‘ever lived common-law partners form the same administrative districts that participated in the first phase of the study.  The reason for collecting qualitative data initially is that there were no existing instruments, nor even a theoretic framework, for understanding the common-law partnership dissolution of this population. By basing the instrument’s development on the theory that will be generated from a grounded theory study, the intent is to develop an instrument that more accurately measured the phenomenon than if it had been based on the scant amount of information currently available in the literature.