Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.3935/rsp.v28i2.1745
Students’ Attitudes towards Marriage, Cohabitation and Transition to Marriage
Željko Boneta
orcid.org/0000-0001-9665-1294
; Faculty of Teacher Education, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia
Marko Mrakovčić
orcid.org/0000-0002-4919-0277
; Faculty of Law, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia
Abstract
The paper discusses the understanding of marriage and forms of partnerships in the late modern society, based on data from a survey of students' attitudes at the University of Rijeka (N = 635). The results reveal ambivalent attitudes about traditional marriage among respondents. Although students reject the idea that every marriage, even a bad one, is superior to other forms of partnerships, the vast majority of them plan to get married in the future. Cohabitation is acceptable to most students and they intend to practise it, but only as a temporary stage before marriage. Attitudes toward traditional marriage and the acceptability of cohabitation were found to be more strongly correlated with the respondents' overall assessment of how important is it for them to marry than with the assessment of their own future behavior in transition to marriage and parenthood. Religious self-identification is a variable that influences both respondents' attitudes about traditional marriage and cohabitation and their perception of their own transition to marriage more strongly than other sociodemographic variables. Nevertheless, it has been shown that its effect is greater on the aforementioned attitudes of students than on their perception of their own transition to marriage in the future.
Keywords
attitudes; traditional marriage; cohabitation; transition to marriage
Hrčak ID:
261366
URI
Publication date:
25.7.2021.
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