Custody and living arrangements after parents separate: consequences, experiences, and factors influencing the lives and mental health of children and adolescents - Protocol for a systematic review

Summary

Parental separation has major consequences for a child. One of the many decisions that must be made is where the child will live and the extent of contact the child will have with each of the parents.

We aim to conduct a systematic review of research on the consequences of, experiences with and factors related to custody and living arrangements that affect children and adolescents. We will investigate children and adolescents’ quality of life, mental health, behavioural difficulties, attachment between parents and children and level of cooperation/conflict between parents.

We will conduct a systematic search for relevant studies in research databases and in other relevant sources. Relevant studies must answer at least one of the research questions and have a suitable study design for questions on consequences, experiences or factors that affect children and adolescents when parents live separately. We will perform double, independent screening of full texts. Based on the scope of the study, we will discuss with the commissioner the extent to which we will assess study quality and synthesize the material. To the extent possible, we plan to, using appropriate checklists, assess the risk of bias and methodological limitations in included studies. Furthermore, we will extract data from the studies and synthesize results either in meta-analyses or narrative syntheses. We will assess certainty in the results using GRADE and GRADE-CERQual approaches.

The report will be delivered to Bufdir by 1. October 2022.