Women's Satisfaction with Their Marriage in Turkey

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to determine Turkish women's satisfaction with their marriage and to establish a standardized scale of marital satisfaction to use for this purpose. This research used descriptive and methodological designs. The population for this study was a sample of Turkish women who were married, and were applying to five primary health care centers in Erzurum, Turkey. Four hundred and ninety-five women were selected by a simple random sampling strategy from a larger population of women. Data were collected using a marital satisfaction scale between April 1 and June 30 of 2002. The Cronbach's alpha for this scale was 0.96. Factor analysis was conducted for the 15 items and a one factor solution emerged that was designated the marital satisfaction scale. The mean score of the scale was 78.54 (sd =19.31) and the mean score for the items was 5.2 (sd= 1.2) points, which revealed that the women were somewhat satisfied with their marriages. The results of this study cannot be generalized to all the Turkish women because the sample represented only one area of Turkey. The validity and reliability of the scale were supported as a measure of marital satisfaction that could be helpful for use in health care centers and offices.

Key Words:

• Women
• marital satisfaction
• marriage
• effective factors