Review of pre-marriage couple education as a preventive service

Family is the most fundamental phenomenon that summarizes a society. The family has undergone changes in terms of its structure, formation and process over time, also under the influence of globalization. In addition to the positive results of these changes, there are also negative aspects such as the increasing divorce rates. In order to reduce the rapidly increasing divorce rates and to create healthy marriages, premarital education programs began to be developed in our country in the 1990s. These programs provided information to couples preparing for marriage on communication skills, coping with possible problems, strengthening the family structure and the family life cycle. This study aims to conduct a qualitative review on premarital couple education and to investigate the content, application methods, goals and effectiveness of premarital couple education, which is currently implemented as a protective-preventive service and carried out by various institutions. Qualitative research method was used in the study and the interview/interview method, in which in-depth interviews were conducted with 9 educators who provide premarital couple education, was preferred as the data collection method. The collected data was analyzed using the descriptive analysis method. As a result of the research, it was concluded that the application methods of the institutions providing the training differ from each other, the training is carried out by professionals from different fields, the training contents do not show great differences between the institutions, but the trainers have a common understanding towards improving the training content, and there is a need for studies to evaluate the effectiveness of the trainings.