Stress and coping resources of divorced women in the Maldives

Abstract

The paper explores the stress level and the coping resources utilized by divorced women in the Maldives. While the study is designed as a quantitative investigation, the general objectives are not to generalize findings but to gain an understanding of divorce demographic and coping strategies of women after divorce. The Taylor’s manifest anxiety scale was used to assess stress, and a second questionnaire assesses divorcees’ current situation and their coping strategies. Both the questionnaires were self-administered by 60 participants identified through snowball sampling strategy. The findings show that divorced women exhibit notable psychological stress, with 46.7% of the participants having high stress, 51.7% having low stress and only 1.7% exhibiting no stress. While other unknown stressors in their life cannot be ruled out, the findings suggest that better socioeconomic, cognitive and emotional resources such as education, employment, adequate finance including child maintenance from the father of the child, emotional support from immediate family as well as friends have a positive impact on reducing stress. Contrarily, the findings also show lack of employment, rental expenses, dependency on an external party for child maintenance support, the uncertainties of a new romantic relationship, and the experience from a painful divorce process can have a negative impact on psychological wellbeing. Furthermore, in adjusting to life after divorce, most of the participants seek financial independence through upskilling and employment, while some divorced women seek remarriage for financial and emotional security.