Examination of marital satisfaction within the family life cycle: The case of İstanbul

Family consists of a dynamic structure that changes and evolves over time. In these developmental processes, which are called the family life cycle, there are certain life events and development tasks that family members need to perform. Family members are expected to adapt to these life events and development tasks. However, in some cases, life events in the family life cycle stages can cause stress and crisis in individuals' marriages. These factors may cause failure in individuals' expectations from marriage to be met, as well as they have an impact on the satisfaction individuals receive from the marriage relationship. In this context, in this study, marital satisfaction was analyzed in the family life cycle stages, at the same time how marital satisfaction differed according to demographic variables was analyzed. Relational screening model was used in the research. The study was performed on a total of 330 married individuals, 180 females and 150 males, aged 18 years and over, who were married for at least 6 months, who were living on the European side of Istanbul. The Personal Information Form was used to determine the socio-demographic information and family life cycle stages of the participants, and the Marriage Life Scale developed by Tezer (1996) was used to measure marital satisfaction. In this study, SPSS 20.0 program was used for data analysis. The t-test was used to determine the difference between the two groups, the One-Way Anova test was used for comparisons between more than two groups, and the Chi-Square test was used to analyze the variables in the family life cycle stages. Post Hoc Tukey test was used for multiple comparisons. When the findings obtained in the study are examined, it is observed that marital satisfaction is changing during the stages of the family life cycle, the marital satisfaction of the newly married couples is at the highest level, the marital satisfaction begins to decrease after having children and reaches to the lowest point when the children enter puberty, the marital satisfaction increases again when the children leave home. At the same time, gender, age, education level, income level, marriage style, leisure activities and individuals' thoughts and perceptions about marriage and marital satisfaction showed a reasonable difference, but no significant difference was found according to the working status. As a result of the study, after the detailed analysis of findings of married individuals' family life cycles, it is observed that there is a reasonable relationship between the family life cycles and working status, getting help in child care, evaluating the spare time and thoughts about marriage, however there was no reasonable relationship between the variables such as individuals getting help in housework or have responsibility of elderly care. The findings obtained within the scope of the research were discussed with the support of literature, and suggestions were made for practitioners and researchers.